A Mad and Faithful Telling

We Say...

Review by Andrew Mueller

Anybody prompted to wonder quite why DeVotchKa sound so odd, intriguing and frankly demented as they do need only contemplate the Denver quartet's background and marvel that they don't sound even stranger. DeVotchka started as a backing band for burlesque performers, developing a versatility that encompassed ska, mariachi and various eastern European folk idioms. They then desecrated all of them with a vigorous enthusiasm that was pure punk rock, doing for (or, more often, to) their influences what the Pogues did for Irish folk and Sixteen Horsepower did for old-school country.

A Mad & Faithful Telling, DeVotchKa's sixth album, is a triumph, buoyed by the confidence conferred when a long plowing of a lonely furrow finally yields fruit (after years building a following, DeVotchKa were asked to score 2006's Little Miss Sunshine, which earned them mainstream exposure and a Grammy nomination). DeVotchKa's unique musical palette throws up a sequence of gleeful tempests, most notably the ska-tinged "Basso Profundo" and the giddy instrumental "Comrade Z," which sounds like it might have been the theme tune for a mid-'70s Bulgarian sitcom. Few indeed are the alternative rock albums conjured from sousaphones, accordions, bouzoukis and Theremins.

The crowning attraction, however, is the voice of Nick Urata. In the context of this album, he's as much a ringleader as a singer, but he nonetheless invests every syllable with passion, recalling the wracked declaiming of the Band of Holy Joy's Johnny Brown or, in gentler moments like "Undone," the Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan. There's nothing here that won't have the same effect as the morning's seventh espresso, but the pick is the delirious waltz "Blessing in Disguise."