Customer Reviews

How It Ends

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Listening to local band DeVotchKa in my car is the next best thing to driving through Eastern Europe with the radio on. Listening to DeVotchKa on my iPod is the next best thing to experiencing the band performing live here in Boulder. DeVotchKa is an indie-alt-rock band that is on the verge of obtaining the wider audience it deserves. My first encounter with DeVotchKa occurred when front man, Nick Urata (vocals, guitar, bouzouki, theremin and piano), opened the show for Todd Rundgren at the Boulder Theater earlier this year with his haunting voice. I then experienced DeVotchKa again on Halloween night, when the full band (dressed as gypsies), including Jeanie Schroder (tuba, bass, bowed vibes), Tom Hagerman (violin, accordion, organ, bowed vibes), Shawn King (drums, vibraphone, trumpet, glockenspiel), and Urata electrified the Boulder Theater with its Eastern-European bohemian music (mostly from this cd). DeVotchKa's music defies mainstream dumbed-down popular music, and unless you already have the band's two previous cds (check out UNA VOLTA), it's unlikely you have anything else in your collection that sounds like this one. Stand out tracks include "You Love Me." "Enemy Guns," "How It Ends," and "Such a Lovely Thing." Highly recommended.

G. Merritt

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.

I can't stop listening to my DeVotchKa CDs. Over and over. Because something new has to be devoured, not sampled, right? Anyway, I can't get over how pretty their songs are. They use so many different instruments, they're like a rock orchestra that's traveled around the globe and taken samples from music everywhere. Listening to it is like being transported. It's magical. The lyrics are poetic, sometimes so sweet you wanna cry and sometimes so sad you wanna cry. And Nick Urata's voice is one of my favorites now. It's almost operatic at times, dramatic, romantic, and like an old lover calling you home. The music is very cinematic for sure - grand and gorgeous. I'm so glad to have seen Miss Sunshine - not only because it's such a great film, but because I would never have known of DeVotchKa. And they have brightened my world. Even the sad songs are hopeful in sound if not in lyric, and I just feel uplifted after hearing them.

Devotchka is a band that really hit me sideways and im still reeling. I discovered the band through thier hauntingly fantastic song "How it Ends" which is featured the trailer of the movie "Everything is Illuminated." I had listened to the single for a few months and then decided to research the band, expecting to find a one hit wonder that couldnt live up to "How it ends". I couldnt have been more wrong. Song after song is brilliantly written, and sounds like nothing else you have ever heard.

And to the two star review on here. You gripe is that you like Gogol and not this band, and say its becuase this band wasnt that lively. Devotchka IS NOT a Punk band. Not only are they not a Punk Band, but they are not this Yellow Card, Simple Plan, Fallout Boy trash. This is a band that has lyrics that are written as smoothly and interestingly as classics John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and others. The music carries the wind of marachi music, with russian music that mixes in a beautiful Way.

Get this album and become hooked.

While not a complete departure from their previous album, "Una Volta," "How It Ends" certainly has a different feel. It has an almost orchestral feel, though it is performed primarily by the band's four members. It feels like the band wrote this album as though it should always be played in a great concert hall, as the grandiose sound seems too big for a bar or rock dive. DeVotchKa have done a great thing in branching out further and not simply retracing the paths they have already walked. Certainly a band that deserves continued attention.

One source describes DeVotchKa as "a four piece multi-instrumental and vocal ensemble that fuses Romani, Greek, Slavic, Bolero, and Mariachi music with American punk and folk roots." Personally, I can only describe their music as among the BEST I have ever heard. It is brooding at times, uplifting at others, always thoughtful, narratively lyrical (each song tells a sort of short story), and solidly melodic without ever being mawkish, phony, or fruity. Just good music.

How It Ends is the best popular music album of 2004, by far. Fine songs (although you have to have some tolerance for sweetness, both in melody and lyrics), professional playing, unique instruments, strong lead vocals and a seemless integration of various folk styles with classic pop structure--it is wholly unlike anything else you will hear this year. Wait and see, this will show up on a lot of year-end best lists, especially on public and independent radio, where it's been getting a lot of play. For perspective, my other favorites this year were Fiery Furnaces, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire and the Walkmen.

I saw DeVotchKa open for the Dresden Dolls, having absolutely no idea what they were like, except for the hearing the word "Ukranian" associated with them. When I saw the band's set-up -- a guy playing both accordion and violin (not at the same time...), a woman playing bass and a giant tuba lit up with Christmas lights, a percussionist with a trumpet, and a frontman who looked like the spawn of Morrissey -- well, yes, that got my attention. And when they started to play...I was thoroughly Impressed. With a capital "I". Nick Urata, the vocalist -- his voice gave me chills, his alternately plaintive and powerful falsetto nearly brought tears to my eyes. In addition to electric guitar and bouzouki, he also played a theremin. (A THEREMIN. Anybody who knows me knows that the way to my heart is via the ability to play a theremin. But I digress.) The energy of the performance was contagious and I felt myself getting swept up in the music that was at once foreign and familiar to my ears. I don't usually seek out this type of music, it was simply thrust upon me, and I liked it a lot.

So I needed to get their CD, ANY one of them, and fast. "How It Ends" was my choice, and it lived up to their live show. With artists I'm not familiar with, I usually fear that their recorded material is weaker than actually seeing a performance. I wasn't let down at all. In fact, the songs on this album have even *more* resonance, and are infused with so much heart and soul and passion and beauty that I still get goosebumps and tears in my eyes. My personal favorites include "You Love Me," "The Enemy Guns" (there's nothing remotely Ukranian about this one, it's actually a Mexican-type norteno), "Dearly Departed" (makes me bawl every time), and "Such a Lovely Thing." But all of the tracks are amazing in their own right.

Devotchka are so far beyond anything else out there right now. This disk is Classic. "Classic". Big fat capital "C". I'll be listening to this cd tomorrow and I'll be listening to it 50 years from now. It will play at my wedding, and at my funeral.A tear in my eye and a glass of wine in my hand. If anything this band is a simple reminder that real music has little to do with money, or style, or even intellect. Music is from the gut and from the soul. Thank God for Devotchka.

This album is a full-bodied wine--complex with a rich bouquet of diverse sounds and heady lyrics. From the very first cut, "You Love Me," you want to keep sampling. The deeper you drink the more you discover the intense flavor of what I can only describe as an oxymoronic mix of musical influences and styles. Even without the assistance of hallucinogens you'll swear you can taste the melodies with your ears; you can even detect the aroma of the rhythms. And before long, you're savoring hints of Orbison, The Call, David Byrne, The Cars, ELO; completely enraptured by the lyrics and hopelessly intoxicated by the sound.