Shout (Devo album)
| Shout | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Devo | ||||
| Released | October 9, 1984 | |||
| Recorded | July 1983 – April 1984 | |||
| Studio | Record Plant, Los Angeles, California | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 32:48 | |||
| Label | ||||
| Producer | Devo | |||
| Devo chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Shout | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Robert Christgau | C |
Shout is the sixth studio album by American new wave band Devo. It was originally released in October 1984, on the labels Warner Bros. and Virgin, two years after their previous album, Oh, No! It's Devo. The album was recorded over a period of ten months between July 1983 and April 1984, in sessions that took place at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, California. The album retained the synth-pop sound of their previous records, with an extensive focus on the then-new Fairlight CMI Series IIx digital sampling synthesizer. Despite the popularity of synthpop in 1984, the album was a critical and commercial failure, peaking at only No. 83 on the Billboard 200 and ultimately led to Warner Bros. dropping the band from their label. Shout was the second Devo album in which co-founder and bass player Gerald Casale sang the majority of the lead vocals, which are usually performed by Mark Mothersbaugh.
Following its release, the band went on hiatus for four years. Although the band would release two studio albums through Enigma Records, they would not release another album through Warner Bros. until Something for Everybody in 2010. The band themselves have been quite vocal in that they were less satisfied with the album and Gerald Casale once said on Twitter in response to a question from a fan that recording the album was even "too painful to talk about."
As with every Devo album, the band developed a new look for the album, eschewing the black T-shirts and slacks with white "Spud Ring" collars, and replacing them with the "Chinese-American Friendship Suits."
The album was the first of two Devo albums to use the Fairlight CMI, the other being 1988's Total Devo. These approaches further pushed the sound of the guitar into the background of their music. Shout was the final album by the 1976–1985 line-up of Devo, with their third and most prominent drummer Alan Myers leaving the band shortly after the album's release. According to the book We Are Devo, Myers cited a lack of creative fulfilment as his reason for leaving the band, something that he had felt since Devo's move to Los Angeles in the late 1970s due to the band's increased use of drum machines and electronics which had greatly reduced Myers' role in the band, even though Gerald Casale had begged him not to leave.
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