Uncontrollable urge to rock

We went out and saw Devo and Tom Tom Club last night, and it was a rocking show. I was actually not terribly familiar with the latter's oeuvre, but they won me over quickly by putting catchy super-high-energy songs in my head. And they're just incredibly bouncy on stage, to the point where one imagines no other workout is needed to keep them so fit.

Devo played a bunch of songs I knew, and a couple I didn't, and generally rocked their way straight through, pausing only for some extreme weird mini-films of a typically Devo style. They closed off with Mark Mothersbaugh in a giant schoolboy costume singing a chipper falsetto Beautiful World while pulling superballs and bananas from his oversized pants to fling into the audience. As cat9 pointed out, leaving the show wondering what the hell you just saw means that you have in fact seen Devo.

I was somewhat hoping that all of their live shows would mix up the musical style as much as Now It Can Be Told, which I'm very fond of, but by and large they played things in their original form. Which, in part, served to remind me that their repertoire is really more varied than one thinks of it as being.

I recommend it.