And you may ask yourself, "What is this swine-loving blogger listening to this week?" For those of you new to this series, let me familiarize you with how it works.
In keeping with this increasingly globalized, glibly compressed, irrevocably speedy, and immanently forgettable media culture, I have devised a simple review system that also allows you to voyeuristically peek into my iPod window but without all the trouble of having to wade through a paragraph or two of self-indulgent prose. I mention it's usually '90s, '80s, '70s, or, sometimes digging way back into ancient history, '60s, influence, and give you a sentence or two explaining (sometimes in high modernist poetic fashion or haiku) why it's cool. All of these artists are creative exemplars of postmodernist pastiche. Little if anything in indie rock is thoroughly new, but the pastiche of styles can be impressive.
If you're not in a hurry, if your life isn't hurly-burly; if you're not thinking right now, "damn, here I am on the internet and I've got so much crap to do!" — well, I'm not talking to you.
Again, here's how it works. What am I listening to?
Thanks for asking.
Devotchka. Transplanted from Denver to New York City. Devotchka, like Gogol Bordello, demonstrate the effects of global music flows in the fast-moving and far-reaching e-world today. They produce quite varied experiments sometimes classified as circus, polka rock, and Spaghetti Western.
On the heel’s of 2004’s impressive How it Ends (Cicero), their most recent album Curse Your Little Heart (Ace Fu, 2006) may even be their best so far. And it’s a cover record, which includes a string-backed lounge tribute to Carson Parks’ 1967 hit “Somethin’ Stupid,” and an intoxicatingly balkanized rendition of “Venus in Furs,” to name only two.
As with other re-interpretations today, these are most impressive in their creative distance traveled from the original template. In Nick Urata’s vocals, Chris Issak-meets-David Byrne to the background of cocktail croons, westerns, and orchestral marches (a signature from their last album’s “How it ends” is featured in the recent underground hit film “Little Miss Sunshine”).
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