DeVotchKa received a career boost when the makers of the 2006
indie-smash Little Miss Sunshine asked the band to contribute to
the film’s soundtrack. Thanks to all the unexpected exposure, when the
time came to record a follow-up, the Denver quartet was determined to
come up with something extraordinary. Or at least as good as How It
Ends, DeVotchKa’s acclaimed full-length.
“You don’t want to get all this attention and then make something
that sucks,” says sousaphonist-bassist Jeanie Schroder, from her home
in the Mile High City. “We did try really hard to not just rest on the
usual things that we always do, or make something that sounds exactly
like How It Ends. We tried to come up with new ideas and
experiment with different instrumentation. We let Tom [Hagerman,
violinist] do a lot more string arranging, and we brought in a string
quartet and some extra trumpet players.”
Not exactly a household name when the filmmakers first rang up,
DeVotchKa was at that point better known for trying to make the
alt-underground safe for Eastern European sounds. Wailing vocals, polka
beats, accordions, bouzoukis, and violins have all been part of the mix
since the band released its debut, SuperMelodrama, in 2002.
DeVotchKa’s latest album, A Mad & Faithful Telling,
continues the tradition. Like previous releases, which include a 2006
EP of covers called Curse Your Little Heart and 2004’s How It
Ends, the disc boasts plenty of the kind of klezmer-fuelled
outrageousness that brings unlikely audience members (i.e., geriatric
Ukrainians and Romanians) out to what’s essentially an indie-rock show.
This is especially true of tracks like “Head Honcho,” which sounds like
it was made up in a Gypsy encampment during a full moon. “Comrade Z,”
meanwhile, has so much Eastern European flavor that, in trying to
recall its name, Schroder at first refers to it by the title of the
little movie that had all of Kazakhstan in an uproar. “I’m sorry, it’s
not called ‘Borat,’ it’s called — ‘Comrade Z,'” she says with a
laugh. “We nicknamed it that because it sounded like something from the
Borat movie.”
The songs that really stick, though, are the stirring, brooding
romantic dramas like “The Clockwise Witness” and “Transliterator.”
These have their fair share of DeVotchKa’s trademark exotica, with
piercing violins and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Nick Urata’s Old
World croon, but they more readily bridge the world of Eastern European
music with western pop.
The group has a few different ways of writing songs, says Schroder,
which may account for the disparity between some of the material.
Urata, who writes all the lyrics, sometimes comes in with a nearly
complete tune, while with others the band members make them up from
scratch in the studio. And Hagerman will occasionally bring in a song
complete with all the parts, as in the case of “Comrade Z.”
The DeVotchKa sound was already coming together when Schroder met
her bandmates through a connection at the record store where she
worked. At first, she filled in on bass. But eventually, Urata,
Hagerman, and percussionist Shawn King let her bring in her beloved
sousaphone.
“I started playing it in high school,” says Schroder. “I’d played
the flute before, and there were a lot of flutes in my high school. So
I decided to switch, since there was only one other tuba player.”
Changing over to the new instrument was the best choice she could’ve
made, she says. She went on to study tuba at college, and her
proficiency with the horn has allowed her to play in a number of
different outfits — a brass band, a brass quintet, a Dixieland
jazz act, a Civil War–themed string group, and a folk duo with an
accordionist.
But it’s her current gig that feels like home. “I loved the music as
soon as I heard it,” she says. “I knew this was what I wanted to
play.”
