if you are not familiar with devotchka and have any interest in anything even remotely european, then you are really missing out. i never knew where these guys and gals were from until just now, and i have to say im extremely surprised that they are from denver, colorado and not some distant european land 40 years ago. while the band is american, its easy to hear the international influence in most of their work, and thats part of whats so exciting about listening to their albums. one minute you feel like youre in the middle of a raucous eastern european wedding, and the next youre taken away on a seven minute mariachi-influenced ballad. id like to take this opportunity to make my first ever reference to a book. listening to their albums (especially how it ends) kind of reminds me of ernest hemingway’s “the sun also rises”. ok, enough of that book talk. it felt weird and unfamiliar.
the other interesting thing i just learned from wikipedia, and something that makes a whole lot of sense, is that devotchka started out as a band that played at burlesque shows and even toured for a bit with dita von teese, the queen of modern burlesque (whose name i always thought was dita von tesse, and who i just discovered is from rochester, michigan!). i guess that explains the sound of a lot of their stuff.
so i guess its funny that after that introduction full of references to far away lands that i chose to feature “transliterator”, the song which probably sounds the least like what ive described above of any of their songs. but it definitely still gives a nod to international music. singer nick uratas voice is just unique enough that you cant quite place where he may be from, though the vibrato definitely conjures images of beirut’s zach condon. devotchka and beirut both remind me a whole lot of europe but in very different ways that i cant describe outside of the pictures in my head. what i love about this song, aside from the obvious over the top catchiness of the chorus, is the insanely excellent rhyming. “beautifully mutilated/insanely antiquated/i must admit i almost always underestimate it” has got to be one of the best 4+ syllable word rhyming sequences out there.
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