Spring Break
DeVotchKa album brings noise, funk
The Little Miss Sunshine band demonstrates its maturity with its latest, lyrically bolder album
by Sarah Bayer
Assistant Arts Editor
Arts | 3/25/08
Posted online at 11:55 PM EST on 3/24/08
DeVotchKa's music is something you usually hear-or don't-in the background. The band draws on klezmer and mariachi influences- essentially an intercultural marriage of wedding music. The 2004 LP How It Ends supplied most of the soundtrack to the film Little Miss Sunshine. But on its latest release, A Mad and Faithful Telling, DeVotchKa brings its own show, one that is both more polished and less restrained than former efforts.
The album aims a well-deserved spotlight at DeVotchKa's lyrics with their gritty descriptions of urban decay and ungoverned desire. On the album's opening manifesto, "Basso Profundo," vocalist Nick Urata describes himself as "a decimator of the cinderblock world, a ventilator of the rallying call." Urata brings equally passionate intensity to the song's romantic imagery, singing, "You are my sugar; you are the salt upon the earth." His words have the freshness and acuity of graffiti against a canvas of old-world melodies.
The band does sometimes fail lyrically, as if distracted by an elaborate instrumentation that regularly incorporates accordion, sousaphone and theremin. "How long will this take? How long must I wait? My heart is sinking. What were we thinking?" flounders Urata on "The Clockwise Witness." Meanwhile, shimmering violins provide adornment where distraction is needed.
The moment is over soon enough, because A Mad and Faithful Telling is DeVotchKa's most fluid work yet. Urata occasionally abandons English to sing in Spanish, skirting the emotional boundaries imposed by his verbal limitations.
DeVotchKa has woven its influences together fairly seamlessly, too. On the impeccably paced track "Comrade Z," the band organically summons radiant South American trumpets from a chorus of whining Eastern European fiddles. DeVotchKa manages to leapfrog through impressively varied genres while maintaining genuine emotional momentum, a welcome change from both the choppy transitioning of the band's debut SuperMelodrama and the stagnant excess of How It Ends.
The album aims a well-deserved spotlight at DeVotchKa's lyrics with their gritty descriptions of urban decay and ungoverned desire. On the album's opening manifesto, "Basso Profundo," vocalist Nick Urata describes himself as "a decimator of the cinderblock world, a ventilator of the rallying call." Urata brings equally passionate intensity to the song's romantic imagery, singing, "You are my sugar; you are the salt upon the earth." His words have the freshness and acuity of graffiti against a canvas of old-world melodies.
The band does sometimes fail lyrically, as if distracted by an elaborate instrumentation that regularly incorporates accordion, sousaphone and theremin. "How long will this take? How long must I wait? My heart is sinking. What were we thinking?" flounders Urata on "The Clockwise Witness." Meanwhile, shimmering violins provide adornment where distraction is needed.
The moment is over soon enough, because A Mad and Faithful Telling is DeVotchKa's most fluid work yet. Urata occasionally abandons English to sing in Spanish, skirting the emotional boundaries imposed by his verbal limitations.
DeVotchKa has woven its influences together fairly seamlessly, too. On the impeccably paced track "Comrade Z," the band organically summons radiant South American trumpets from a chorus of whining Eastern European fiddles. DeVotchKa manages to leapfrog through impressively varied genres while maintaining genuine emotional momentum, a welcome change from both the choppy transitioning of the band's debut SuperMelodrama and the stagnant excess of How It Ends.
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