DeVotchKa

With fiddles spitting sparks like the Devil is scraping their strings with flint, and Roy Orbison-meets-Morrissey vocal tremulations, DeVotchKa has become a major alt-folk-indie player. The title track to their 2004 album How It Ends sets out the band's agenda in a single song, which was later used in the film Little Miss Sunshine and earned them a GRAMMY® nomination. On "The Clockwise Witness" the honey-coated sweetness of the pizzicato strings and the tinkle of the toy piano just barely tether the song to reality, while lead singer Nick Urata swoops and whirls like a mad genius who has just broken a decade-long, self-imposed silence.

In Next Steps, we'll hear DeVotchKa trek to rattlesnake-infested badlands, en route to Vegas.

As you'll have guessed by now, DeVotchKa's musical appetite is virtually insatiable, and they lay out their smorgasbord of influences like a continent-spanning feast for your ears. Violinist Tom Hagerman unleashes his inner gypsy on Una Volta's "Death by Blonde," a dazzling (and digit-dislocating) display of fiddle pyrotechnics, Eastern European-style. On "La Llorrona" (roughly translated as "The Mourner"), the band tears a page from the Ennio Morricone songbook, with spaghetti Western brass laid over the top of a funereal waltz that brings to mind visions of rolling tumbleweeds and a post-gunfight Lee Van Cleef, as he squints into a low sun.

Imagine for a moment that David Byrne had grown up in Budapest, listening to Django Reinhardt, the Velvet Underground, and 3 Mustaphas 3. Hopefully, that will give you some idea of where Devotchka are coming from . . . but whenever you think you've got them pegged — surprise! — the group is already a step or two ahead. With fiddle-finger fireworks and vocals that quake and quiver like Roy Orbison at his heartbreakiest, DeVotchKa straddles the divide between East and West, indie and world, folk and alt like no one else out there. How many bands can you name that would be equally comfortable — and successful — opening for Calexico, Marilyn Manson, and Dita Von Teese? Well, now you've found one . . . and you're probably gonna have a long wait till you find number two.