The single-artist covers collection is getting as commonplace as the various-artists tribute album. Look at just a smattering of who's went and done it: Cobra Verde, Xiu Xiu, Crooked Fingers, Bob Dylan, Guns n' Roses, Will Oldham, Cat Power, the Autumns, Yo La Tengo, Alasdair Roberts, Duran Duran, Paul Anka, Metallica, the Soft Pink Truth, Rage Against The Machine, Golden Smog, Los Lobos, Fairburn Royals, Ivy, Everything But the Girl, Neko Case, Dave Pajo, Guster, Twilight Singers, and David Bowie. Then you have covers-only bands such as Iron Horse and Nouvelle Vague that constantly risk relocation to the Kidz Bop/String Quartet ghetto.
For an outfit to truly justify such an endeavor for non-fans and not seem like they're dropping covers career-strategically (show of hands if your interest in M. Ward was piqued via his Bowie torch-vamp), they'd better have an angle, or personality, or unmistakable idiom. Well, can't nobody else trudge on DeVotchKa's self-staked turf; a Spanish/gypsy sound, except the caravans are done up in velvet, and the singer's tux could fit either Achtung Baby-era Bono or non-electro Patrick Wolf. The largeness can't help but come across as cinematic, and I'd like to think that even dullards envision all manner of lightings and mises-en-scène to this music. (The band is named, of course, after A Clockwork Orange's slang for female, and that book's narrative is most popularly experienced in the form of Stanley Kubrick's film.)
"I Cried Like a Silly Boy" is credited to Ted Thacker, who must be DeVotchKa's fellow Colorodoan who was in Baldo Rex and Veronica. The band performs this song in the mode of Caetano Veloso-versus-Chris Isaak on the set of an Elvis beach movie, and it's a swooner. The lone original composition, "Curse Your Little Heart", features irresistible thrash cowbell and seems designed to dare Calexico and the tango excursions of Tom Waits into a dark alley, right down to the guitar tone.
From here things really take off: "The Last Beat of My Heart", is, I'll say it, a better listen than Siouxsie's original, featuring the most confident cavernous self-production that I've encountered since the Walkmen's debut. DeVotchKa owns this song, and grafts such elegant and tasteful wings onto its carcass that even secular humanists might be inspired to go on an epic quest for a subconscious, unicorn-plagued dreamworld beyond this realm of fiberglass and Goo Gone. This band must know how close to Hallmark they are prancing; few mortal passions could earn such sincere camp. Which is why, reckon, they offer the goofy Sinatra classic and then the antsy Velvet Undergound classic in an (almost comically) exotic manner that would drive Lou Dobbs bonkers-- DeVotchKa maintains a menacing deadpan.
