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.
That said, DeVotchKa cycle through and marry varying strains of world music with great aplomb. It's very rare that you'll find a seam. But what this record lacks so painfully is the sort of clearly defined personality that an accompanying visual element so easily provides, be it Dita von Teese, Parisian alleyways or New Mexican landscape. Frontman Nick Urata's croon adds a certain amount of shadow and theater to every bar, but it rarely resonates in a way that's connected to any song's core here. In fact, 100 Lovers, with its interludes, clever sequencing, and the appropriately titled instrumental "Sunshine", feels less like a grouping of songs as it does an entirely different animal altogether: The film score without a film to call home.
