The satirical protest, spastic structures, and deadpan humor of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! run so deep that it took decades for the music cognoscenti to come around and appreciate the record on its own terms.

Ranked the 252nd Greatest Album of All Time by Rolling Stone and amid the 100 best efforts of the 1970s by Pitchfork, Devo’s radical debut helped steer the new-wave movement that followed. And as fate would have it, it is more relevant in the 21st century than at the time of its release.

Sourced from the original master tapes, mastered by engineer Krieg Wunderlich, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing in California, and housed in a Stoughton gatefold jacket, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition 180g 45RPM 2LP set presents the 1978 benchmark in reference-grade sound.

Benefitting from the extra groove space on this first-ever 45RPM version by playing with enhanced definition, deep-black backgrounds, and ultra-quiet surfaces, it reveals previously buried nuances and portrays soundstages whose scope is limited only by the capacity of your audio gear.

The presence, clarity, and detail of this reissue render in three-dimensional fashion the textures, tones, and effects critical to the music. Though Brian Eno butted heads with the band during the recording process, the merits of his production emerge like never before.

The treatments that turn Devo’s keyboards into the equivalent of futuristic machines; the metallic effects and pointed sharpness of the percussion; the various voices that emerge in the distance; the sonic symmetry of the arrangements; the herky-jerk motion of the singing; the stickiness of the bizarre time signatures: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! comes across like a pointillistic painting seen up-close.

Side 1:
1. Uncontrollable Urge
2. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
3. Praying Hands

Side 2:
4. Space Junk
5. Mongoloid
6. Jocko Homo

Side 3:
7. Too Much Paranoias
8. Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)

Side 4:
9. Come Back Jonee
10. Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’)
11. Shrivel-Up

I’m not sure that I can accurately convey what it was like to be 12 years old when this album came out and to spend an entire weekend listening to it over and over. Everything that was big and bloated and bombastic in rock of the era was deconstructed and discarded. It was all stripped down and mechanized, making the entire band an astoundingly tight rhythm section in lockstep, simultaneously embracing, commenting on, and parodying the uniform conformity that your middle school self was just starting to be aware of and chafe against.

If it feels forced, that’s part of the message. Staying up late and watching them on Saturday Night Live as they turned in a bizarrely robotic performance of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction was like seeing the revolution televised. The howling outrage at the performance from the kids with feathered hair and Led Zeppelin t-shirts said everything we needed to know about the state of evolution of arena rock — it was at a dead end, and everyone crowding into the stadium to see Mick Jagger ’78 doing his rote impression of Mick Jagger ’68 was playing their assigned part; gathering together in one place for the convenience and destructive ease of the incoming asteroid.

The forced artificiality of Devo’s music laid bare the forced artificiality of mainstream music and the culture of Camaros with roach clips hanging from their rearview mirrors that dominated America outside the big cities. They saw DE-eVOlution happening in real time and their music and message plainly said We’re just like you, playing a part just like you do except we aren’t pretending that it’s a heartfelt expression of our own free will. Are we not men? We are Devo. And you are Devo too ... even if you don’t get the music.

Hear the 1978 record Rolling Stone Ranks the 252nd Greatest Album of All Time in Reference Sound. Mobile Fidelity’s Numbered-Edition 180g 45RPM 2LP set reveals copious nuances and textures and is out now!

1/4” / 15 IPS analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.

Official Purchase Link

www.clubdevo.com

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