What do you do when you were once the future? Either you revisit old glories wholesale or update your formula with an identikit album aping your absolute heyday. Sometimes this works – like, say, AC/DC’s Black Ice – and sometimes it isn’t quite as valiant – The B-52s’ Funplex, for example.
So, with the aid of the Mother advertising agency, Devo re-imagine themselves for the 21st Century, a little like Christian Bale becoming Batman or Daniel Craig with James Bond; it’s all and, simultaneously, not all about the past. Something For Everyone takes the Devo template and makes it how people believe they should sound: appropriate quirkiness here, synthetic fun there.
By putting the album at the heart of a multi-media package, they wryly comment on the times in which they’re trying to situate themselves. The joke of Devo as a brand to be marketed, complete with focus groups and market research is good enough to be sustained across the album. You have the comic book rush of Fresh and What We Do, the amusement arcade sounds of Mind Games. No Place Like Home is anthemic and rather lovely, sounding not dissimilar to Heaven 17. The final words on March On, the album’s last track are, pointedly, “In the meantime, on with the show.” For Devo, it is business as usual. And rather marvellous it is too.
