Devo – Duty Now For the Future – 1979
Duty Now For the Future opens with Devo’s Corporate Anthem which could just as easily been the theme to Space:1999 or The Lathe of Heaven, it’s sci-fi to the core, dystopian but with a sense of the absurd. Things weren’t that bleak back then. They were, but we all had a sense of humor back in the 70s.
The album tries to be as cheeky as its predecessor but doesn’t quite hit as hard in most places. The obvious Uncontrollable Urge, “Clockout” tries to hard to be new wave soul that it just misses the mark as does “Blockhead”, this album’s “Mongoloid”. That said, almost all the songs on Duty Now clock in and out so quickly that they play as a sort of soundtrack for corporate cubist America. Taken as a concept album of sorts, Duty Know is actually quite brilliant.
Taken song for song, Duty Now is actually not that great and a completely unnecessary relic in light of how brilliant the debut and the next record would be.
Grade: B-
ASide: Secret Agent Man
BlindSide: Timing X
DownSide: Swelling Itching Brain
