Devotchka
I don’t collect records the way I used to. With a few freakish exceptions (YKWYA) nobody does.
To be fair, I was never an obsessive—even in the 1980s. I anticipated and purchased the new records by my favorite bands on their release dates—but I was no completist. Some of my friends had problems, though. Bret had to have every available version and format. When WASP released a 12” picture disc single of “I Wanna Be Somebody,” he’d buy one (sometimes two) even though he already had the white vinyl, the gold vinyl, the clear vinyl, the splatter vinyl, the die cut 7” and the Japanese import.
That first WASP may have been my favorite record of the entire era. But one domestic copy of the LP was sufficient for me. I still have it.
But sometimes we buy records we don’t need. That’s why there’s Record Store Day.
Week #6: DeVotchKa, A Mad and Faithful Telling. Purchased at Avalon Records in Bellingham on Record Store Day, 2019. Favorite side: I honestly can’t tell them apart…
Like many people, I initially became aware of DeVotchKa via the alternate art form of film. It is still impossible for me to separate the plot & performance of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE from the music of DeVotchKa. They are one and the same, and I fell hard for both of them in 2006.
By the time I got hip, though, it would be impossible to see the band in a venue appropriate to their makeup. Between Nick Urata’s emotive crooning and the band’s array of subtle acoustic instrumentation, DeVotchKa demands to be seen in an intimate, comfortable venue. Preferably one with a round stage, velvet curtains, strong cocktails and maybe even a cigarette girl.
Imagine our disappointment seeing them for the first time in 2008 at the hellish SoDo Showbox, a concrete cooler that seemed too base even for Motorhead when I saw them there (on my birthday) several years later.
No. The days of being able to see DeVotchKa at the Triple Door or the Neptune, or busking on a sidewalk are done gone. They have been for decades.
So what’s a casual fan to do other than stir one up, slip into the smoking jacket and listen to DeVotchKa’s records at home? A MAD AND FAITHFUL TELLING is a perfectly good choice, because it sounds exactly like every other Devotchka record.
Not that I own or have even heard ‘every other DeVotchKa record’ but when I cracked the cellophane on this one after staring at it for five years, I was struck by how much it reminded me not only of the LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE soundtrack, but in fact everything I’d ever heard by the band, both live and on record.
For kicks, I whipped out my streamer and punched up the band’s latest album, 2018’s THIS NIGHT FALLS FOREVER. And I’ll be damned if it might as well have been the same clutch of songs.
All of which begs another hysterical, historical question: when a band puts out 12 records in 20 years and they all sound exactly the same—is the artist to be praised for consistency or derided for lack of growth?
It doesn’t really make much nevermind to me. I happen to like DeVotchKa’s tangos and timbre, their embrace of non-traditional instrumentation and the fact that they often sing in a language I don’t understand. But you don’t really need to own every record they’ve made. In fact, you really only need one. It doesn’t much matter which…
Coming in March: Oscar Snubs
(Cynic’s note: As if to spite me, DeVotchKa will be playing in town between the velvet curtains of the unspeakably luxurious and inviting Mt. Baker Theater on Thursday. The last time Patti and I saw them, we actually had to walk out because the sound was so bad at the first Tune-Up festival two years ago. But presumably all the microphones will actually be working indoors at the acoustically-perfect MBT. We probably should go…)