1980@40: FREEDOM OF CHOICE - DEVO

Having conquered a whole stratum of the submainstream system with an array of records and difficult videos, Devo, along with Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, were showing as much of the world as they could reach that American rock music could sing differently from the ice-cream cocaine hell that was Steely Dan, The Eagles and Billy Joel. By the time this one came along, Devo's assault was concentrated that the songs, while perfectly individual, were hard to tell apart. That was intentional. Devo's brief was to use uniformity in art to crack the surface of it in the culture.

Every song is a tightly machined unit of guitar rock laced with the synthesiser sound de jour, each one coming in between two and three and a half minutes. Like the frozen berry pullaparts you could get at the supermarket to make that 10pm work night a little special you could do the lot of pick sections as needed. That's why this album has the sense of being a long suite of statements rather than a dynamic flow of moments weighted accordingly.

That is almost true. In fact, the Mothersbaughs were sharp songwriters with a good ear for hooks. So, while this album is like a small chrome berry pullapart there are some songs that make compilation albums despite never being singles. The massive title track with its great doubletracked vocals and guitar assault emerges from an assembly lined thunder on electric tom toms. Freedom from choice is what you want. This was a single. So was Whip It. Bizarrely, this shout against the coming storm of Reaganomics with its disturbing video of distorted Americana went top 40. Gates of Steel bursts into the light as a brilliant keyboard fanfare lifted by guitar wash from below. The steely vocals describe the human lot (half a goon and half a god) recalling Beatle's choruses as much as the hard nosed authority from above already looming on the horizon. It's a masterpiece.

So, while I thought it best not to go track by track in agreement with the intended uniformity of the record it's worth noting the efforts of any vision-led band who are too good to quite appear machine perfect and break into a very tough and sweating invention. Devo, by the nature of that vision, were not long for continuation beyond the point of repetition but even that suited them. A million compilations with unvarying tracklistings later and The Rolling Stones are simply still on the market in bitesize units. Devo's built-in endurance gives us a futureproofed perfection. Beat that, Eagles.