Devo - 'Duty Now For the Future' (Warner Bros.)

The inexorable progress towards new wave! Devo's second album is pretty hot but it's definitely a change in sound. The really brutal, primitive broken stuff is less prevalent - no 'Too Much Paranoias' here -- and the keyboards are more prominent. Devo seems to have taken on their sci-fi influence more overtly, as these songs suggest robots and space travel more than they seem to be about Devolution. Exceptions, of course - opening cut 'Clockout' and 'Smart Patrol' have that sense of regression, but otherwise this is a 'Wiggly World', with faster and sharper guitar turns, thick digital keyboard assonance and a significantly more intelligent vibe. Don't worry, though - 'The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprize' is about V.D. (I think) and 'Pink Pussycat' has the high-school sex-starved nerd imagery that began on the Hardcore-era cuts. 'Day My Baby' contains a 60s (or maybe 50s)-influenced chorus that shows Devo are capable of utter pop brilliance if they want. The opening "Devo Corporate Anthem' (surely performed at the beginning of every Devo cover band concert, or at least the two that I've played in and/or attended) sets the tone - Devo really are a corporation, active to this day in jingle-writing and other such work, and this philosophy seems to merge well with the misanthropic art-fuck of their origins. 'Mr. DNA' has a punk edge, and also contains the beautiful lyric 'He's an altruistic pervert', which is the best kind, right? Every song on here is a winner, pretty much, except for the cover of 'Secret Agent Man', which lacks the irony of 'Satisfaction' - though its still competent enough, I suppose. At the same time, this feels like the beginning of the end - I've never hung around for the 'Girl U Want'/'Whip It' era, though it's still wonderful and amazing that they found chart success. If I were a Devo conspiracy theorist, maybe I would point to this as being the point in which Mark Mothersbaugh asserts himself as proper 'leader' of the band, having swung away from Jerry Casale (where the balance was probably felt perfectly on the first album) - but that's not to say I don't like Mothersbaugh as a musician, artist, and overall renaissance man.

John Cale - 'Paris 1919' (Reprise)

Classic time! Paris 1919 is without a doubt my favourite John Cale solo work, and my particular copy is decrepit and moldy, with visible ringwear on the cover and a cut corner, indicating a promo bin/discount from some point in its timeline. This suits the record perfectly, for while there are some grand, bold arrangements here (if viewed as a rock album -- if viewed as orchestral pop, it sounds tiny), it's also self-consciously a product out of time, a displaced object bathed in sentimental memories and old dust-rust. The photos of Cale in his impecable white suit all bear the "last known photograph" effect, a compromise on his purity. And likewise, the sound is filled out with organs and the molasses of lower-mids. Listen to 'The Endless Plain of Fortune' if you don't believe me - it's a tune that trudges along, pushing forward through it's own cellos and violas, unable to reach the end. There's not much looking back to the strum-und-drang of the Velvet Underground on Paris 1919, or even the piano pounding ofChurch of Anthrax. When 'Macbeth' enhances the energy at the end of side 1, it still fits within this cohesive framework of the whole, and it's just a blast of fun, turning rowdy and cacophonous at the end. But dark clouds are pretty much absent here, though I would hesitate to call this an upbeat LP. When you have a tune as traditionally beautiful as 'Andalucia', you can't really see this as anything particularly challenging or avant-garde. Cale's singing voice is perfect for this material - supported by sliding guitars and organ textures, there's a buoyancy to his baritone bleatings. The fact that most memorable lines are delivered slowly, extending over several phrasings or chord changes, make Paris 1919 feel like a record of proud statements. 'Nothing ever frightens me more than religion at my door,' but this is an assessment of life at whatever age he was in 1973, built on Cale's not-forgotten past and sketched out through observations ('Half Past France'). And the title track, baroque and vulnerable, which I first heard when I was 14 and thought "This is like classical music, only like rock, and good too!". For a tune about longing, loss and ghosts, it's bouncy and bright, and the essence of what I thought "Europe" was before I ever got here. And then 'Graham Greene', where the Welsh accent gets a bit out of control, and Cale audaciously rhymes 'holding umbrellas/catching novellas' -- well, what a tune! I've listened to these songs back-to-back for so long that the feel like natural counterparts, even though they're pretty extremely different. This looks forward to Fear - another great album, but a lesser work - but you can have a second chance. 'Antartica Starts Here' is a nice closer of the (too-short) second side, with confident bass guitar and mechanical Wurlitzer supporting Cale's raspy poem. This is the weirdest falsetto singing I've ever heard, going for secrecy instead of heights, but it swells up when needed and marks a point of closure. Whispers linger on after the stylus spins out, and maybe I keep coming back to this, over and over, because I like secret communication.

Amon Düül II - 'Phallus Dei' (Sunset)

The more technically skilled side of the Amon Düül collective made this first album in 1969 and started a whole new strain of German rock music that is still influencing kids today. The first side is surprisingly conventional rock, though of the very progressive variety, if progressive means lots of chord changes, modal riffs, and polyrhythms. Side two is the 20 minute title track - which is a pretty great title, if you sprechen sie bit of Deutsch - and it starts off in a very progressive way, if progressive means dark synthetic hellbeast screaming drone vortex. It falls into place though with the ragin' riffs and rhythm shifts, before taking on a weird neo-classical/folk content. Maybe I just get all tingly whenever I hear a violin being played like that but I think they were really looking at Grosse Bretagne. When you can feel the fire ticking it's most effective, but I keep thinking ahead to Yeti (which sadly won't be reviewed here, as we don't have a copy) and the gnarly wizard cookout that was to follow. I'm pretty sure I saw a Kurt Kren film one that had this album as the soundtrack, though it looked more like the proper German cover than this disappointing British value series cover. Interesting though: the back cover touts some of the other records in the series that may be of interest to Amon Düül fans, such as Shirley Bassey and Del Shannon.