New Traditionalists

About

“We go where we go,” said Devo co-founder Jerry Casale during the tour for 1981’s <i>New Traditionalists</i>. “Otherwise we’d still be dressing in the yellow suits and playing that crude, edgy music.” On the group’s fourth album, the ever-restless Devo indeed found a new way forward. The first album self-produced by the band, <i>New Traditionalists</i> moved the band further than ever from “rock music”—fewer guitar, and more synths and drum machine. Instead of trying to replicate the completely unexpected success of 1980’s <i>Freedom of Choice</i>—and its monster single “Whip It”—<i>New Traditionalists</i> finds Devo blooping and pulsing its way toward a darker, more robotic stomp. The result is the group’s moodiest album—one that finds Devo abandoning the approach of its first three record, which often found the band members doing a tightrope dance with irony. Instead, <i>New Traditionalists</i> finds Devo making direct appeals to the misfits and mutants in their audience. Singing in a steely deadpan, vocalist Mark Mothersbaugh lays out the party platform on the opening track “Through Being Cool”: “If you live in a small town/You might meet a dozen or two/Young alien types who step out/And dare to declare/We're through being cool.” It’s a song that espoused the “Hip to Be Square” philosophy well before Huey Lewis and the News made it a mantra. The single “Beautiful World,” meanwhile, is as gorgeous as misanthropy get, with Casale convincingly laying out a utopian fantasy over multiple verses—only to twist the knife once the chorus arrives: “It’s a beautiful world…for you.” .

via Apple Music

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