Devotchka, James McMurtry, and Matt Costa 

Devotchka

A Mad and Faithful Telling | Anti

Guaranteed to elicit the “who is this” response from anyone nearby, Devotchka is the quirky Denver four-piece (guitar, drums, accordion, tuba, violin, piano, theremin, the works) best known for providing music from the album How It Ends to the soundtrack for Little Miss Sunshine. The fourth album returns to the band’s roots, even covering a song from their debut called “Head Honcho”—now 30 seconds longer, darker, stormier, and slurrier, as if the band has spent the decade getting steadily more drunk on whiskey. Frontman Nick Urata is the kind of presence that either entices people or repulses them immediately, with a wailing voice and open-jawed enunciation that becomes so yowling it’s difficult to tell when he sings in English and when he sings in Spanish. Underneath is the band’s patented mixture of Slavic gypsy (“Strizzalo”) and Mexican pump-and-toot (“Blessing in Disguise”). There’s also the new wrinkle of whatever’s going on with “Transliterator,” the album’s single, which has irrepressible forward motion on the line “beautifully mutilated / instantly antiquated / I will admit I almost always underestimate it” until a strange caesura, the horns so muted you could be on a balcony somewhere between Russia and Cuba, listening to the celebration of some forgotten and ghostly revolution. | Chris J. Magyar

James McMurtry

Just Us Kids | Lightning Rod Records

When it comes to addressing this country’s heartland-locked working class, it’s never “you” with 46-year-old Americana singer-songwriter James McMurtry, it’s always “we.” And herein lies McMurtry’s greatest gift—his ability to merge two disparate identities. He’s both the good ol’ boy and the poet, a true and articulate spokesman for America’s wage slaves without a hint of pretension or pity. McMurtry returns in top lyrical form on Just Us Kids (April 2008) with a fistful of anthems and ballads that stir up the primal dust of America’s most marginalized towns. While 2005’s Childish Things may have served up broad reprimand of Washington, corporate profiteering and the Iraq War (“They’ve never known want, they never know need, their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed”), on Kids, McMurtry calls on President Bush directly (“You’re no longer daddy’s boy … but you’re only Cheney’s toy”). A set of burning riffs initiate McMurtry’s steely critique of our dependence on foreign oil (“Three wisemen in an SUV. That thing don’t run on French fry grease, that thing don’t run on love and peace”). When protest isn’t the goal, McMurtry conjures rich characters—real people, who are often broken, but always painted with dignity. On Kids we meet 50-year-old Ruby (“Her body still could rock all night, but her heart was closed and locked up tight”) and Carlos, a veteran of the first Gulf War who is “looking past the saddle-shed from way on back inside his head.” But Kids’ greatest achievement might be its revelrous eponymous track, a gift to babyboomers in search of an anthem. As the chorus goes: “It’s just us kids hanging out today, watching our long hair turning grey / not so skinny, maybe not so free, not so many as we used to be.” | Amanda Martinez

Matt Costa

Unfamiliar Faces

Brushfire Records

Matt Costa’s second album, Unfamiliar Faces, is a veritable masquerade of mop-top tunes and sullen serenades displaying Costa’s talent for assimilating a variety of styles into his foundational folk sound. Starting and ending with the coupling of “Mr. Pitiful” and “Miss Magnolia,” Costa frames his myriad visages with the contrast of piano banging cabarets and twangy country romps. Alternating between solemn ballads, Dylan-like harmonica and witty medical metaphors, with a surprising emotional deviation in “Bound,” Unfamiliar Faces reaches beyond Costa’s comfortable acoustic plucking and soft, endearing vocals. Costa’s downfall, however, is a rather unfortunate habit of swallowing his voice and muffling his lyrics, lending an uncertainty to his work. As many critics point out, Costa is still tripping through a mélange of styles as he moves towards his own. With some certainty behind his malleable voice and a consolidation of sound, Costa could have one very familiar and well-known face. | Hannah Buoye

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