Send "DeVotchKa " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 A year ago in June, DeVotchKa walked onto a French stage. It's an easy enough place to envision them, the cosmopolitan, globe-grinding Denver outfit having much lifted much of their sonic foundation from Eastern European gypsy trails that wind their way through the rest of the continent. But that stage was planted inside the Stade de France, an 80,000-capacity beast built for the 1998 World Cup Final outside Paris. DeVotchKa were there to open for Muse, a long way from their origins as a burlesque backing band that spent years releasing records on their own. 100 Lovers, their latest, finds them shedding their remaining punk tendencies for a more ambitious, pop-driven streamlining of all the world sounds they've shown interest in up until now. Despite its knowing arrangements, it ends up feeling rootless.Much of DeVotchKa's rapid rise can be traced back to 2006's Little Miss Sunshine, a film whose unlikely commercial success brought the band's score and OST contributions to a much larger and wider array of listeners. And 100 Lovers seems fit for the screen. The backbone of "The Common Good" is built on South Asian strings, but what they scream most loudly is "Bollywood." Likewise, the accordion and spy guitar of "The Man from San Sebastian" recall any number of John Barry-scored hijinx. With the exception of "100 Other Lovers" or "Exhaustible", a whistle-laced strummer clearly aligned with the quirky indie pop sensibilities that synced so well with Little Miss Sunshine, 100 Lovers lives and dies by the high-drama crescendo. So whether they're retreading Slavic ground or playing with mariachi horns as they do on "Bad Luck Heels", there's a climax to be reached in grand, cinematic fashion. They never fail to reach it....full text |
| Popmatters |
| By the time Devotchka caught their break by being asked to score Little Miss Sunshine, the band were already world-travelers, experienced in playing for burlesque shows and putting on strange live shows of their own. The breadth of experience applies to the recordings, too, which blend a variety of eastern European music with Latin and US southwestern styles, along with more mainstream rock and punk sounds. Albums like Una Volta and How It Ends were original and idiosyncratic while remaining accessible. Now, five years removed from the noteworthy covers EP Curse Your Little Heart and the Little Miss Sunshine work, the band continues to refine this sound, tightening an idea that seems to be too multifaceted into something increasingly coherent. As 100 Lovers starts, you might think the band is simply moving in a more straightforward indie rock sound. Opener “The Alley”, despite the restrained strings and piano leading the song, owes heavily to the Arcarde Fire. That band’s not an unlikely influence—a high number of instruments, fun with the accordion, and a bit of history together—but usually engaging singer Nick Urata seems to follow Win Butler’s style on the vocal. The track’s pleasing, but fortunately it’s a bit of a misdirection. Devotchka’s triumph on their new album is the increasing synthesis of their many influences. You don’t get to yell “Wheee! Mariachi!” on this first track (and really, do you want to do that anyhow?), but that doesn’t mean the band’s drifting into more radio-typical sounds. All the previous influences still present themselves throughout the album, but more seamlessly than before. Even a more exotic track (to US ears) like “The Common Good” sounds less like one tradition juxtaposed with another and more like, well, Devotchka....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| One interesting thing about the glut of multinational roots-influenced bands that cropped up in the last decade has been watching them parse their diverse influences, figuring out sustenance beyond the initial novelty of their culture colliding sounds. Devotchka's interpretation of Balkan and Eastern European folk tropes always seemed to fall in the middle of the spectrum, not as madcap and careless as Gogol Bordello, not as elegant and structured as Beirut. That lack of a signature position has developed into a wider malaise on 100 Lovers, where, shorn of the exigencies of cramming together varied sounds, the band has slipped further into the great middle. This process has been in action since their 2001 debut, Supermelodrama, where those global influences were a calling card, but never a fully exploited element. Songs like "Devotchka!" were naïvely self-assured despite their wholesale porting of overdriven gypsy punk without any creative input from the band. This kind of lazy confidence had a certain charm, but was also clumsy. Here that verve has melted into a defeatist conventionality, with songs that don't reproduce a specific style as much as the status quo. A track like "All the Band in the Sea," while more conceptually and melodically rigorous, pushes the band's usual influences back into mere window dressing via a subtle violin backing track, the band otherwise relying on standard indie-rock techniques. This whole cycle is distilled on a track like "The Common Good," which opens with a bland world music fusion of wailing Middle Eastern violin and Spanish-tinged handclaps. The band briefly finds an interesting rejoinder, thrumming up a nasty guitar gurgle that briefly creates a spine for the whole equation. Rather than pursue this to a more creative end, the band uses it as a stepping stool to an approximation of Arcade Fire-style bluster, segueing from traditionalist appropriation to a more modern equivalent....full text |
| Artistdirect |
| Watching the video for "Dark Allies"-- one of four outstanding tracks on Brooklyn dark wave duo Light Asylum's debut EP, In Tension-- you get the feeling that, at any moment, vocalist Shannon Funchess and synth player Bruno Coviello are about to have it...full text |
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