For The Record

Denver Taken Aurally

Discovering, DeVotchKa!

In the final wild night of a two-week long polka, beer and sausage festival, when the fire-breathers and burlesque women have all but lost their minds to strong drink and pig oil, DeVotchKa will come onstage and herald the apocalypse in one last orgasmic celebration of romance and tragedy. Nick Urata's pleading wails will be heard alongside the violin and sousaphone as the whole squalid race dances down into the abyss. And in those last quiet moments of oblivion, the din of the crowd's humming will seem to mimic the strains of the accordion and theremin—two boxed instruments, that, like DeVotchKa, seem to come from either end of the century.

With a sound that has been called, "Eastern Bloc Indie Rock," the classically trained musicians Nick Urata (vocals, guitar, bouzouki mandolin, theremin), Tom Hagerman (violin, accordion, piano), Jeanie Schroder (sousaphone, upright bass, vocals) and Shawn King (drums, percussion, trumpet) draw on a kaleidoscopic range of ethnic influences. Fusing the sounds of spaghetti westerns, Slavic folk music, mariachi horns, and rock and roll, they create music that is both radically modern yet reminiscent of the traditional folk music of past centuries. Generations removed from their ancestral heritage, the band still evokes the authentic feeling of "the old country." Fitting then that Liev Schriber's upcoming film, Everything is Illuminated, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, should utilize DeVotchKa's "How it Ends" in its telling of a grandson's journey to Ukraine in order to find the woman that saved his grandfather's life during WWII.

Inspired by the music they were writing and performing for a cabaret in Chicago, Nick Urata and Jon Ellison traveled to Denver to enlist the other members of the band. Losing Ellison and gaining Hagerman, Schroder and King, the band named themselves after the Russian diminutive, "young girl," a term popularized in the fictional language of Nadsat, from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. In 2002 DeVotchKa self-released Supermelodrama and proceeded to tour extensively throughout the US. When I heard them that year in Santa Fe, they took on the proportions of great fire-breathing dragons. I watched as they set the stage, wearing billowy, French-cuffed shirts and tight-fitting suits and began to weave a sort of aural Dostoyevskian epic. Of course, it's totally histrionic music; from threatening suicide in "Danglin' Feet," to the litany of curses on ex-lovers throughout all three albums to the line, "Love is like a dirty whore," the music is wrought with a deep sense of loss and bitterness. Urata's eyes bulge as he moans from the depths of an ocean of agony, while Hagerman's head follows his bow in some fanatical trance and Schroder bulges her cheeks on a tuba garlanded in Christmas lights. Surely, one thinks, there must be more than four musicians making all that sound. The whole show was a beautiful, tragic danse macabre. I naturally assumed they were destined for stardom. Needless to say, they have remained largely unknown until recently; refusing to sign to any label, they built up their fan by touring relentlessly with other indie groups such as M. Ward, Flogging Molly, Calexico, and 16 Horsepower. As in their musical style, the band stresses a folk approach to recording, resisting the music industry, preferring instead the life of gypsy bards.

To increase the breadth and spectacle of their shows, DeVotchKa added various belly dancers, circus performers and burlesque/fetish entertainers to their lineup after the release of their 2003 album Una Volta. Thus, where Supermelodrama shows much more of the band's capacity to rock, Una Volta played to the eclecticism of the group's wide range of instrumentation. So while their second album lacks some of the gut-wrenching and gasoline-tasting, its instrumental prowess calls to mind the exotic spectacle that attended its myriad rehearsals in smoke-drenched bars across the country. Their third and most recent effort, 2004's How it Ends, is a concept album based on a ranchero who returns from war to find his lover marrying an older man for his money. "Such a Lovely Thing" captures the essence of the album: "You only love me when I'm leaving." Drawing on the epic themes of love and loss again and again, each of DeVotchKa's songs reach a fevered climax and then pull away from the breach to linger at its edge and restore a brief moment of sanity. Like the Decemberists or Grandaddy, they frequently use formal narrative lyrics like those of the ballad. But just as often, Urata's lyrics take the form of a man drunkenly ranting at the moon.

And yet despite all the histrionics, the absurd instruments, and the Flamenco apparel, DeVotchKa manages to escape the gimmickry and confusion that so many experimental indie groups fall prey to when they adopt too much style and too many instruments. If nothing else, this is a band that knows itself and is true to its vision; however melodramatic, it's still authentic. Don't miss their upcoming show; October 29th at Lupo's with the Dresden Dolls and the Faun Fables.

Nolan Shutler B'06 pines for the old country

Mo' Metal Than Yo' Momma's Kettle

Fear Before the March of Flames

It used to be that the forty miles that separate Boulder from Denver were occupied by little more than an occasional farm, hundreds of cows, and vast fields of grass. Some of the grass is still there, but there are Subaru dealerships and a Vans Skate Park where farms once were, and at least one strip mall and a gated community in the place of each cow. It was somewhere within this monotony of contemporary suburbia that I first experienced the band Fear Before the March of Flames and all of their adoring friends.

My high school lies in the heart of Denver right off of Colfax Avenue, a street made notable by Jack Kerouac's 1957 On the Road as home to Sal Paradise and now swarming with harmless hookers and johns. It was only at the insistence of a friend that I ventured beyond the quaint comforts of the city to see this band she was completely infatuated with. The first time I saw Fear Before the March of Flames was in one of the countless strip malls strewn thoughtlessly about Colorado's Front Range. After battling my way through cul-de-sacs and dead ends I found the venue, the Java Cow, an uninspiring ice cream and coffee shop where you might expect a vanload of small kids in shin guards and cleats on a Saturday afternoon. Instead though, this was a Friday night and the thirty or forty kids packed inside were mostly all sporting Hurley and Volcom skate-tees—a few were wearing more tightly-fitted shirts with band names like Something Corporate printed across the chest. I assailed my ears for the night, listening to this cacophony of scathing screams and heavy guitar, but truly took pleasure in the theatrics of their performance. Here were five guys with guitars and mics awkwardly thrashing and flailing in a small gap within the sweaty crowd.

The summer before their senior year (and, in a couple of cases, junior year) at Aurora's Smokey Hill High School, five popular guys started playing typical skate punk under the name 36 Flip. Within months their sound had evolved through an equally-poppy emo stage to a point where while some of the whiny, more melodic vocals remained, most everything else had been replaced with cathartic screaming and more abrasive guitars. Borrowing a headline from a Rocky Mountain News article about the fires that ravaged the Colorado forests that summer, the band renamed themselves Fear Before the March of Flames. Then in July 2003 after barely a year together, Portland, OR's Rise Records released Fear Before's first album, Odd How People Shake.

Odd how people change, really, because in the months between my first Fear Before. show in December 2002 and their CD release fiesta, they certainly had. Even more remarkable than the band's tighter pants and bigger plugs was the change they inspired in their surprisingly large and enamored following. It took a while for me to place all of these kids done-up in pink and black that had descended upon Denver's Climax Lounge for the occasion, but I finally recognized all of the kids with dyed black and blonde hair and heavy eyeliner as the band's formerly PacSun-clad schoolmates—whose senses of style had evolved to parallel the music their friends were playing.

Since Odd How People Shake, Fear Before has released a second album, Art Damage, on their new label, Equal Vision Records. The new album showcases even further evolution in the band's sound. Most audible links to their emo past are gone and instead Art Damage is unapologetically metal—heavier guitars, caustic vocals, and dissonant melodies. They have come a long way in the last three years. They have two albums and two more due out on their new label. They have an absolutely enormous internet following including 19,624 friends on MySpace (an online community similar to TheFacebook.com, but with a larger focus on music). They have a vegan merch guy selling Donnie Darko-inspired t-shirts. But above all, they have fashioned a community for themselves out of those equally dissatisfied with their suburban lifestyles and have reached beyond, to those outside of suburbia.

Fear Before popped my hardcore cherry. Before that fateful night at the Java Cow I had settled for struggling awkwardly to place the whole music scene within my urban sensibilities. But everything finally made sense. I used to wonder about who all of these scene kids were, where they had come from and where they hid themselves during the day. It took following Fear Before and their friends for me to understand something so simple: all the suburban kids are wearing eyeliner and stretching their ears for a very simple reason—all the cool kids are doing it.

Ellen Chu B'07 wants you to submit to 68 Degrees.

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com