A CD you will not regret buying! After hearing Devotchka in 'Little Miss Sunshine' and during the trailer for 'Everything is Illuminated' I decided to investigate them further. If you like eastern-euro music, gypsy music, or are a fan of Gogol Bordello, Beirut, or enjoy the music of 'Le fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain' then you will love this CD. Sometimes you buy cd's that you listen to right when you buy them but then they hit the cd shelf for all eternity, but this is a CD i find myself frequently re-visiting. It is a beautiful array of eastern-european music with both elements of accordian-folk and 'gypsy' rock. I love it!
Coming Up This is a fascinating, addictive mash up of styles that never sounds forced. Elements of a number of bands surge above a basic template of Eastern European folk music The excellent "Twenty-Six Temptations" sees the lead singer with crooning warble taking a page from Tom Waits, and album highlight "We're Leaving" accompanies Calexico south of the border. Elsewhere, notably on "Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny Of...)" they bear a striking resemblence to the underrated American band Pinetop Seven. Other influences might be The Smiths, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nick Cave, and Serge Gainsbourgh. Although Devotchka sounds at times like a talented opening act for a bigger band, by the end of the album, they have proven themsleves to be that bigger band, worthy for a shot at the title.
Uneven for me, but can't get enough of the highlights For me, How It Ends is a somewhat uneven album - I'll specifically note which songs I like and don't like below - but I find myself listening to the pieces I do like over and over (and over).
The album starts off a bit iffy for me. "You Love Me" is forgettable. I don't hate it, it's just not particularly better or worse than any other song I'd hear on the radio.
"The Enemy Guns" signals a change in pace and style and message, and it is a welcome one. There's a visceral energy here that got me to keep listening.
"No One Is Watching" is a 28-second instrumental, which would suggest to me a transition track, but it doesn't match up with the prior or next tracks in any way, shape, or form. It's an interesting sound, but is too short to "get into" and doesn't get us from A to B. Throwaway track.
"Twenty-Six Temptations" is the first track that made me think there was something imaginative happening on the album. A bassline produced by tuba? A high, haunting voice over a latin rhythm? It's a song that made me work to understand it. That's a rare thing, and appreciated here.
"How It Ends" is beautiful - sparse and repetitive in a proper way, excellent use of crescendo just after the chorus, sad. Another keeper. It also follows "Twenty-Six Temptations" in a good way, thematically.
"Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny of...)" is a wonderful instrumental piece. Whereas "No One Is Watching" just sort of sticks out, "Charlotte Mittnacht" acts, for me, as a surreal followup to "How It Ends" as well as developing in its own right. Can you have trance music without the thumping electronica? Trance polka? Because this is a polka, but polka as conceived by someone living inside the painting Starry Night.
"We're Leaving" keeps up the energy. I'm once again jarred as, after the Parisian/Slavic (if it sounds odd combining those two, listen to the whole piece to understand why) feel of "Charlotte Mittnacht," we come across a Mariachi band. In contrast to the happy brass, the lead singer's voice is desperate solitary here, and it works excellently. What begins as a carpe diem message slowly drowns in its own history, and the singer who exuberantly leaves is left alone.
"Dearly Departed" on the other hand, annoys me to no end. It may because the lyrics here are just insipid. I don't look to DeVotchKa for great lyrics, but after the lonely power of "We're Leaving," it just sounds obnoxious and thin to hear a drawn out "Sweetheart / How I miss your heart / Beating next to mine."
"Such A Lovely Thing" picks up the pace yet again, a rollicking, near-drunk romp through several ethnic styles that spirals faster and faster as the piece goes on, nearly spinning out of control but managing to just continually raise the bar for five minutes.
"Too Tired" gives us a moment to calm down with a crooning love song(set to a glockenspiel so high it might be a music box). Again, the oddly paired elements blend beautifully here.
"Viens Avec Moi" is an off-key wonder. Make the normally high voice an effective bassline, pair it with a frenetic accordion, and just dance (dirty). I wish U2 could have heard this song when working on Zooropa.
"This Place Is Haunted" does nothing for me. It's nice, it's pretty, but doesn't stick out in my head hours later. Worse, it sticks out at first because it is so different than "Viens Avec Moi." No time to come down, just jumping into harps and softness. On its own, it may work, but the poor placement on the album is problematic for me.
"Lunnaya Pogonka," another instrumental piece, is once more action-packed, but a creepier piece, one that takes its time coming up and then shows you the aftermath. A better followup to "Viens Avec Moi," and probably would have been the best way to end the album - it takes us into DeVotchKa's crazy layering of sound, but then lets us down and shows the lonely end to the party as well. The most varied piece on the album.
"Reprise" is OK. Sorry to damn with faint praise, but reprises work best when the album as a whole has a consistent arc to it. These songs did not, and so the concept of a reprise seems tacked on to me.
I find myself giving a couple of songs five stars, a few more than that four stars, and then a couple of twos. As a whole, I think the album could have been arranged with more thought, but I ultimately think it worth four stars.
Highly recommended... I purchased this CD when it was first released three and a half years ago and am still listening to it on a regular basis.
The vocals remind me of Roy Orbison (one of my favorite classics) and the instrumentation and production are lush and very atmospheric.
Absolutely Amazing I had never heard of this band until yesterday.
I was just looking around the web and happened upon a website that had one of their songs on it "How It Ends". I only got to hear about 4 seconds of the song, but it was enough to make the hair raise on the back of my neck and send electric chills that I haven't had from music in a long long time.
It made me go out and get all of their stuff and so far, I love it all. I haven't heard anything this amazing since The Magnetic Fields.
His voice is abosulutely amazing and soul piercing.
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