DeVotchKa Issue #35

A Mad and Faithful Telling (ANTI–)

By Anna Breshears
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 12:30pm

DeVotchKa’s songs evoke scenarios in such sharp relief, listeners find themselves immediately transported to a café bathed in candlelight, a riotous Cinco De Mayo festival, or a Bosnian dance hall filled with drunken grandfathers. This Denver quartet’s rich melting pot of Mariachi, Romani, Slavic, and American influences fuels their sweeping odes of heartbreak and joy on A Mad and Faithful Telling, the band’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2004’s How It Ends.

Telling begins with the celebratory “Basso Profundo” in which bass-y woofs of sousaphone cavort with exotic percussion and wild violin, while frontman Nick Urata’s smoky tenor curls around each line with theatrical flourish. The two “traditional” instrumentals on Telling show off DeVotchKa’s old-world skills: “Comrade Z” would prove irresistible to a Russian, vodka-swilling uncle, while one can practically hear Parisian street vendors in the distance while listening to the whimsical “Strizzalo.” One of the album’s finest tracks, the Tom Waits–y “Undone,” finds Urata’s bruised narrator pleading, “My fate is firmly in your hands / Take if you must take me / Well I cannot go peacefully / I have someone waiting / I left them so terribly,” amid an arid southwestern waltz of acoustic guitar, bouzouki, and accordion. For DeVotchKa, tragedy is more romantic than a happy ending.

By crossing borders and centuries for inspiration, DeVotchKa proffers one the most modern takes on rocknroll today.