Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! - Devo

 

Provenance: Another one from my Toronto haul. But I've long had a liking for Devo, having owned a 'greatest hits' compilation for a little while now.

Review: I'm going to open this up by stating that I have always felt a little wrong-footed where Devo are concerned. Their absurdist aesthetic and 'zany' music initially persuaded me that we're dealing with some art-house aural commentators-cum-pranksters, along the lines of Frank Zappa or perhaps even Oingo Boingo. 

However, on the evidence of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, I am convinced that this is a band who uses wackiness to conceal the fact that they're deadly serious.

Although part of the New Wave, Devo's roots pre-date punk and were initially buoyed by the artsy concept that humanity was regressing or de-evolving (hence the band name), a theme that surfaces every now and again on this album. In addition, founding member Gerald Casale was an eyewitness to the Kent State Massacre, where National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four of them. This is some quite heavy material for a joke band, no?

So here we have Q: Are We Not Men?, a title very aptly taken from H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau and with an album cover sporting an image not of the band but an airbrushed image of the professional golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez. The Moreau inference - the creation of animal-man hybrids - fit into the devolution thesis nicely, but golf? Perhaps its emblematic of a culture that is slowly amusing itself to death, the "good walk ruined" being a past-time of the rich, idle and non-productive members of society, sucking up precious resources to keep their wastefully large fairways verdant out in the Arizona deserts. I say all this as a golf fan.

So what does all this blarney sound like when put to music? Pretty great, actually.

My favourite thing about Q: Are We Not Men? is that it's constantly kicking against rock conventions, sometimes by omitting them entirely (overt displays of tasteful technique, emotive singing) but sometimes by warping them out of shape into new and uncanny forms. Take opener 'Uncontrollable Urge', which sounds like the Romantics' 'What I Like About You' with all the groove and swing taken out; in its place are jerky, sped-up rhythms and a singer hooting out 'yeah-yeahs' like a malfunctioning robot. The latter affectation is particularly striking, stripping away the grunts 'n' yelps of innumerable rawkers of any sense of verisimilitude and so amplifying the notion that what you're hearing is artifice, fakery; a sham.

Yet 'Uncontrollable Urge' also explodes out of the speakers despite its stiff-collared discipline, and there's a weird exhilaration to be found within the rush of its motorik rhythms (NB: Alan Myers was one of popular music's great underrated drummers, no?).

Devo repeat the trick on a brilliant deconstruction of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', almost an ur-text of modern rock music, turning it into a jerky android tale of consumerist frustration, complete with babbled 'babybabybaby' chants in place of Jagger's Thames Valley bluesmannery. This, and especially 'Jocko Homo' (which has a kinda, sorta call-and-answer version of the album's title as the chorus), sound not too dissimilar to latter day Captain Beefheart, most notably Bat Chain Puller (Shiny Beast), where recognisable time signatures are thrown out in favour of undanceable and awkward rhythms that nevertheless somehow hang together. It's not easy to listen to, but it's a perverse kind of fun.

Yet how, in 2021, do we parse a song called 'Mongoloid'? It's about an individual with Down's syndrome, but the lyrics are clear that he leads an ordinary life. Devo are always playing tricks on us, though always with serious intent; is their point (very controversially) that modernity has presented wage-slave humanity with an existence that is so flattened that it really doesn't make any difference if its participants possess any kind of developmental disorder? Or is it a commentary on everyone living the western 'bring home the bacon' lifestyle, much as we might be described as 'normies' or 'sheeple'? Nonetheless, the song leaves a slight whiff of distaste, even if the meaning is a little cryptic. (Perhaps that unease was exactly what Devo were aiming to produce?)

Side two of Q: Are We Not Men? possesses some fairly hard-driving music, almost punky in its execution, with Mark Mothersbaugh's garbled hysteria powering 'Gut Feeling (Slap Your Mammy)', 'Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')' and 'Come Back Jonee', the latter being another dissection of rock 'n' roll, this time Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode'. Instead of seeing his name in lights, this titular Jonee cuts out on a woman and slams his Datsun into a truck, 'Detroit Rock City' style. 

Beneath all the whizz-bangs and geekery, as mentioned previously, I detect something quite sincere. The subdural content of Q: Are We Not Men? is not light-heartedness or quirkiness but a deep cynicism and pessimism. It's a world of conformity, of angst and of the trauma done to the individual in a post-industrial world. By the same token, spontaneity, emotion and individual expression have all been snuffed out. The universe created by Devo on this album hardly smacks of 'hail fellow, well met' good cheer or merriment. It's bleak.

Maybe Devo lost their way a little later on by using the poetry of would-be Reagan assassin and current Twitter celeb John Hinckley Jr for lyrics? Or, say, when they teamed up with Disney to create a family-friendly version of themselves played by child actors called Devo 2.0? Perhaps these acts were taking Devo's almost nihilistic central theses to their logical conclusions? Perhaps they needed they money? Whatever happened to Devo since they first appeared - and yeah, they probably did soften up somewhat - the music that appears on Q: Are We Not Men feels like an articulation Futurism's proto-fascist politics crossed with a mangled version of Krautrock. Difficult, infuriating, ambiguous - and, at times, brilliant.  

Squeezing Out Sparks - Graham Parker & the Rumour

 

Provenance: A very solid review in a magazine convinced me to buy the remastered, reissued version of Squeezing Out Sparks. But why? Prior to sticking this in the CD player, I'd never knowingly heard a single Graham Parker track in my life. 

Sometimes you just have to take a chance, right?

Review: From a sight-unseen punt, this has become one of my all time top-ten albums. It may not be the most musically virtuosic, Parker might not be the best singer, and there's precious little here to bother the charts; nonetheless, permit me to reach into my bag of cliché here, because little sums up Squeezing Out Sparks better than 'greater than the sum of its parts'.

Which isn't to say that some of those elements I've already highlighted aren't up to snuff. The Rumour are a no-frills unit but as tight as a Skyscanner-sourced airport transfer, honed as they were in numerous pub-rock outfits in the same London scene that gave a home to acts as disparate as Ducks Deluxe, Kilburn & the High Roads and Dr Feelgood. The album came at a time when a lean, stripped-back approach was in vogue, though on Squeezing Out Sparks it's enlivened with touches of New Wave twitchiness and Parker's natural inclination towards soul music.

On that point, Parker is, one feels, a blue-eyed soulman trapped inside the larynx of a punk-rock snarler. What emerges is an angry, sneering voice that still achieves a kind of brawling musicality, a triumph of energy over technique. However, it's as a songwriter that Parker really intrigues, and on Squeezing Out Sparks he comes close to greatness with his vituperative and peculiar perspectives on life. Only his hardwired idiosyncrasies prevent him from achieving a universality, but I would argue its precisely his weirdness that sets the album apart.

To pose a few examples, we're treated to the disorienting 'Discovering Japan', which condenses a recent tour experience into impressionistic, fragmentary surrealism; the seemingly sincere desire to learn about extraterrestrial life on 'Waiting for the UFOs'; and the steaming paranoia of hard rocker 'Protection', probably my favourite track on the whole album. You can feel your skin tighten as the song proceeds, which starts with a throwaway dismissal of Winston Churchill and ends with a demented "You wanna hide? You wanna hide? You wanna - hide, hide, hide?!". Put simply, despite its relatively conservative formal trappings, I've yet to hear anything quite like Squeezing Out Sparks.

In terms of the best songwriting on the platter one must head to 'You Can't Be Too Strong', a gentle ballad that contains the album's title in its lyric. It happens to be about abortion - furthermore, you're left wondering (if the contents of a popular song are to be believed) quite where Parker stands on the issue. So often, such an emotive subject is presented in song as either pro- or anti-, but here Parker slips through the cracks, and through documenting the ambiguities around abortion creates something quite unsettling - and masterful.

The version of Squeezing Out Sparks I bought contains two bonus tracks, which I don't usually include in reviews but they're too irresistible to gloss over - 'Mercury Poisoning', a delightfully acidic jab at his former record label wrapped in a horn-powered rocket of a track; and a very decent cover of the Jackson 5's 'I Want You Back', lending the song a toughness that doesn't exist in the original. Cherries on top, really, as even without these two belters Squeezing Out Sparks is a genuine masterpiece, larded with spite, jealousy, wonderment, confusion and, every now and then, a hint of joy.

Oh, and if you don't believe me that Parker is a bit of an eccentric, you're more than welcome to head to his website and check out his novel, The Thylacine's Lair (name of the protagonist: Brian Porker). 

Only A Lad - Oingo Boingo

 

Provenance: Oingo Boingo were a personal recommendation made to me. After a little research of my own, I bought today's album, Only A Lad, and a later effort called Dead Man's Party.

Review: This is the full-length debt of a band with at least one member who would go on to do, shall we say, other things (I hesitate to use 'greater' in the usual formulation). Although a clutch of Boingo alumni would move into film and TV scoring, its vocalist and rhythm guitar player Danny Elfman whose work is the most immediately familiar. Aside from scoring many Tim Burton films (the best of his output, in my opinion, featuring in The Nightmare Before Christmas), there's also the small matter of the theme tune to The Simpsons.

All of which is totally banal and rather irrelevant, because aside from a predilection for quirky compositional choices, hints of the later career only surface sporadically in the sparky, pulsing New Wave rock on Only A Lad. It's a cool sound, too, marrying the punchiness of bass-driven pop with inventive horn charts, characterful vocals and dark humour.

And, oh yeah, they really 'go there' at times. By which I mean, if you're not familiar with the infamous lead-off track 'Little Girls', you might just want to apply some circumspection to the way you word your Google search. However, a lyric refracted through the twisted justifications of a (wannabe?) child abuser notwithstanding, it's a primo cut of Oingo Boingo; tense, claustrophobic, dancing on the edge of hysteria and yet grimly funny for all that. The video, which takes some of its cues from German Expressionism, is worth a shufti, discomforting as it is.

This isn't the only instance where Elfman and co. decide to shine a light into the murkier corners of society with a dash of irony and a catchy beat. The title track 'Only A Lad' is, if anything, an even better - and more excruciating - listen than 'Little Girls'; not so much the subject matter, which in this instance is a murderous child, but in the skin-tightening stress of the strangulated vocals and ominous electronics jabbing away at your cerebral cortex. Yet, once again, it's a corker of pop song.

These tiptoes into taboo represent the most transgressive material that Oingo Boingo cover, but that doesn't make the rest of Only A Lad easy listening at all. Much of the album concerns itself with feelings of isolation, a sense heightened by Elfman's hyperactive, madcap delivery. So we have 'Capitalism', dripping with irony and sounding like Duane Eddy crossed with Devo; the stuttering rhythms of the bouncy paean to alienation that is 'On The Outside'; and a deconstructive take on the Kinks' hoary old garage band fave 'You Really Got Me', with vocals that prefigure Eiffel 65's 'Blue' by almost two decades. In fact, it's in the midsection and coda to 'You Really Got Me' where you can, with finely-tuned ears (pay attention, children!) hear a nascent sound that would soon be fully realised and parping out of a billion TV sets to herald the start of a Simpsons episode.

A criticism I have seen about Oingo Boingo, and specifically about Only A Lad, is that they too often favour a 'kitchen sink' approach to production and arrangement, throwing all kinds of wacky sounds and whiplash tonal changes into the music. I don't get it. The only time I think this holds some validity is on closer 'Nasty Habits', although I would argue that the bells and whistles suit the knockabout atmosphere. Otherwise, Only A Lad shares some of its sensibility with Talking Heads, Discipline-era King Crimson, The Tubes, Japan and a few others who were unafraid to fill their records with discordance and interesting sounds without sacrificing the ability to write a tune. 

Yes, Tin Pan Alley this ain't - you'd be pressed to whistle too much of this, despite the catchiness; at times Elfman's vocal acrobatics can produce a faint ache behind the eyes, but the commitment to his role of a manic lord of misrule is almost actorly. Spoiler alert: the spikier edges are sanded away on later releases like Dead Man's Party (albeit, it's an interesting album in its own right), but for the quintessential Boingo, look no further than this kaleidoscopic circus of raw nerves, high anxiety - and quality music.    

Discipline - King Crimson

Provenance: I volunteered at Reading Festival in 2003 (I realise you're all clamouring to know whether I saw Sum 41 - the answer is yes), and my friend Simon, with whom I was camping (next to members of Linkin Park's extended entourage, some guys from the Datsuns and a former Deep Purple roadie) told me about a record fair that was taking place in the leisure centre next to the festival site.

Desperate to get away from the wretched swine who hemmed me in day and night, I readily agreed with Simon's suggestion to slip away for an hour or two.

I hadn't intended on buying anything, but that's been the perennial bleat I've made every time I've exited from a music shop or bookstore laden with purchases. Anyway, I kept my 'discipline' here, and bought a single album - King Crimson's Discipline(!), influenced jointly by my dad owning In the Court of the Crimson King and having seen the Discipline line-up on a Fridays rerun. They sounded pretty cool, and they had an odd looking fellow playing a Chapman stick. Sold!

Review: When I was growing up in Bournemouth it had a reputation as a place to go once you've given up on life; later on, thanks to the proliferation of clubs with names like Wiggle, Bliss and Toko, weekends in the town became one long bacchanal, if such revels solely consisted of guys in Ted Bakers getting in paggas at taxi ranks and driving modded hatchbacks very slowly around the 'Westover circuit'.

What was never apparent about Bournemouth in those days was its status as an incubator for many a prog-rock superstar. John Wetton (King Crimson, Asia), Greg Lake (Emerson Lake and Palmer) and Robert Fripp (King Crimson) all met each other at Bournemouth College, whilst the Giles brothers (King Crimson) were also local. During my late teens, quite a few then-current / former members of Hawkwind (honestly, they probably couldn't tell you whether they were in the group or not) used to hang around a pub I would frequent, and my mate Max and I would receive semi-regular thrashings on the pool table from these erstwhile psychonauts.

This should mean nothing when it comes to a sober appraisal of Discipline, but my take on their output is tempered with a small but significant - and no doubt idiotic - dose of hometown pride. We had sticky clubs pumping out DJ Otzi megamixes, a shite football team and our most famous residents were Max Bygraves and Jimmy Savile. King Crimson, at the very least, had a degree of credibility, even a touch of mystery - bandleader Fripp was a retiring, elusive presence, and their version of prog left no room for flummery or whimsy. To those of us of sound mind, pop music can't really hurt you, but for my money King Crimson's Red is about as unsettling and scary as the genre can get. Cool!

But Discipline is not Red. This is King Crimson meets Talking Heads, heavily influenced by the new wave and self-consciously arty. However, Robert Fripp is undoubtedly one of the more cerebral guitar slingers out there, and for Discipline he recruited other guys who weren't exactly slouches in the brains department either - Adrian Belew (guitar, vocals), Tony Levin (bass, Chapman stick) and the incomparable Bill Bruford on drums (the single holdover from King Crimson's previous studio album, the aforementioned Red). This adds up to an arch, clever-clever group of musos with the chops to pull off some complex ideas.

Two things at the outset - first, these guys can't sound convincingly playful. Not even wacky old Adrian in his pink suits can escape the po-faced pomposity of some of the subjects that Crimson tackle. I'm not expecting the kind of winking bawdiness that AC/DC do from King fucking Crimson, but even lighter themes are turned into somewhat byzantine word-and-rhythm games. I don't think anyone has ever referred to King Crimson - any line-up of King Crimson - as 'the lads'. The second point, slightly adjacent to the first, is that everything on Discipline is highly technical, highly strung and very buttoned up. Nothing on Discipline sounds at all organic (probably by design, given the name), so one has to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy it. This isn't music to relax to - quite the opposite - it's tense, itchy, uncomfortable. This latter issue isn't necessarily a criticism.

In fact, when it comes together, Discipline is a marvel. For all that they've sacrificed any notions of looseness or vibe for technical ecstasy, the personnel involved mean that the level of playing is simply dazzling. Bruford is the standout for me, conjuring up polyrhythmic patterns of rare power and drive. I reckon an album solely of Bruford's contributions would be quite listenable. The word genius is tossed around a lot when a simple 'very good' would do, but he's worthy of the mantle.

Elsewhere, the strength in Discipline lies in the sheer range of weird and wonderful sounds the rest of the band coax from their instruments. For example, on opener 'Elephant Talk', some clever sod has got their guitar sounding like a pachyderm's trumpeting; and instrumental 'The Sheltering Sky' features a slew of guitars that have been pushed to their outer limits. Here, the effect is sometimes shrill and uncanny - but on the gorgeous, aching 'Matte Kudasai', the weeping violin effect is mesmerising, elevating an already plangent tune to greater depths of sensibility.

And where necessary, in between the Afrobeat guitars and paradiddles, King Crimson can still muster up a mighty roar. The first instance that the heavily overdriven guitar kicks in during the chorus of 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' is a startling, even overwhelming moment - so all-consuming is the sound that it knocks the wind out of the other instrumentation and almost takes on a physical dimension. Mostly the jump scares are absent, though it really doesn't matter whilst the arrangements ping and whizz around in a dizzying, whirling, triumphal demonstration of what happens when pure ability is harnessed to a singular, iron will. Discipline is whip-smart, deadly serious, a little pretentious - and perversely, a lot of fun.

Oh, and Blur were absolute pony at that year's Reading Festival. I gave up and went to watch Billy Bragg instead.

The Lexicon of Love - ABC

Provenance: Not a clue. I had 'The Look of Love' on a compilation called Atomic 80s before I obtained this album; I think that it would've been a combination of hearing that and 'Poison Arrow' on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that convinced me to lay my money down.

Incidentally, the radio station in the game that plays 'Poison Arrow' was called Wave 103, and a few years later I would end up writing advert copy for a station called Wave 105. Did it feel like being in a GTA game? Just a bloomin' bit!

Review: In the normal course of my reviews I fish out the CD, blow the dust off and await my auditory cortices to ping my consciousness a faint pulse of recognition. Not in this instance; Lexicon of Love is a staple part of my musical diet, one of the select few albums to make it onto my iPod. As such it's frequently in my headphones when I'm navigating the circuit of micro-humiliations otherwise known as going to the gym, or pumping out of my car's ridiculously overpowered sound system. It's a keeper.

Furthermore, earlier this week I saw ABC (well, Martin Fry 'n' friends) play the entirety of this album with the assistance of the South Bank Sinfonia. I guess that it's the only way to properly experience Lexicon of Love live - even the most sophisticated synthesisers would struggle to replicate this album's lush, widescreen approach to composition. Seeing original arranger Anne Dudley conducting the orchestra was merely the cherry on top.

Nonetheless, I'm going to play it through whilst typing, purely for the sheer enjoyment of it all. I don't have to; I know every horn flourish, every cluck of slapped bass, every lovelorn sigh. It's majestic, the pinnacle of New Romanticism; the Guardian review of a show on the same tour called Lexicon of Love Martin Fry's Citizen Kane, and it's hard to disagree. As interesting and ambitious as Beauty Stab or How to Be a...Zillionaire! are, it's Lexicon... that has ended up looming over ABC's discography, the yardstick by which everything else Fry produced would be measured against. It's no wonder that the latest ABC release is The Lexicon of Love II (a fine album).

The fact remains that the least of the tracks on Lexicon of Love would probably be the lead single off any other band's biggest seller. It's that good. Trevor Horn's trademark impeccable production means that every note shines with an iridescence; if you're familiar with either Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome or Yes' 90125 you'll know what I mean. If not, it's hard to explain in a pithy way exactly what it sounds like, but here goes; dry, chickenscratch guitar; prominent, rubbery mid-range bass; reverb-laden keys; and tightly wound percussion that eschewed the then-fashionable practice of noise-gating the snare (think Phil Collins' 'In the Air Tonight' for an example of noise-gated reverb on the snare). It all adds up to a glossy, zesty mix that both dates Lexicon of Love very definitely to the early 1980s and makes it explode out of a good set of speakers.

None of this would add up to much more than an airily pleasing confection if it wasn't for the songs. And what songs! I don't know who my readers are, but if you're not familiar with 'Show Me', 'Poison Arrow', 'All of My Heart' and 'The Look of Love', get onto Spotify or YouTube toot sweet. Better yet, just buy this album because it's brilliant and I want to see ABC play with an orchestra again. In an era - and subgenre - that welcomed cerebral lyrics within a pop framework, Fry combined clever wordplay with an almost inestimable depth of sincerity on the topic of love. Love, that most hackneyed of pop subjects, is the unifying theme of all ten of the tracks. As Paul McCartney acknowledged, it's tricky enough to write a single non-silly love song. Check this out:

A pirate station or the late night show
A sunken ship with a rich cargo
Buried treasure that the four winds blow
Wind and rain it only goes to
Show me, show me, show me that you're mine

Or this:

When I'm shaking a hand I'm clenching a fist
If you gave me a pound for the moments I missed
And I got dancing lessons for all the lips I should have kissed
I'd be a millionaire
I'd be a Fred Astaire

The whole album is littered with these lovely little associative twists and turns which gather into impressionistic nuggets of imagery that always make me cock an eyebrow in appreciation, no matter how familiar I am with the song in question. Oh, and every song is shot through with irresistible hooks. Hooks on top of hooks. More hooks than Captain Hook's spare hook drawer.

The greatest performance on the album comes courtesy of frontman Martin Fry. In some ways it reminds me of Sandy Denny's work on Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief;  on that album, and often in the course of a single song, Denny's voice would swoop and soar, coo and caress. Fry does exactly the same thing, with an added dollop of melodrama. Even when it sounds like he's straining at the outer edges of emotion there's a catch, a sob in his voice that makes even the most over-the-top declaration of love's vices or virtues absolutely believable. Yet the sophistication with which this is all-delivered makes Fry sound tragic in only the most heroic sense, albeit a hero imbued with the lizard charm of Bryan Ferry. Fry never knowingly undersells a line, and that's part of the magic.

To sum up, The Lexicon of Love is not just a great album; it's possibly resident in my all time top ten, and considering the number of albums I own and have listened to down the years, that's no mean feat. I haven't even touched on the influence of cinema that is keenly sensed - just look at that album cover - but driving down the coast into a pink sunset with 'Poison Arrow' as the soundtrack certainly makes me feel like I've been transported momentarily onto the silver screen. Put that into the mix with Cole Porter, Roxy Music, David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder and you're somewhere in the ballpark of where this album ends up. Epic, panoramic, witty, debonair and unapologetically overblown, The Lexicon of Love is the stuff of dreams.