BUY CD HERE
BUY VINYL HERE

For a decade plus, the Denver band has churned together gypsy folk, string-drenched film music and pop melodies with the soul of Sinatra and the heart of a punk rocker. The band’s fifth album, “100 Lovers,” is its most sumptuous, teeming with lessons learned and experienced gained. And at its best – the shimmering “Bad Luck Heels” or the pulsating “All the Sand in All the Sea” – the disc is positively transporting.

Singer Nick Urata is DeVotchKa’s key figure, and everything on the album is driven by his velvety croon or tethered to his elegant guitar figures. The compositional scope is broad, and the personality presented is impressively unaffected. The record swerves from the resigned “Exhaustible” to the leathery “The Man from San Sebastian” to the exotic “Ruthless.”

The band plays with an effortless consistency, and so the windswept leadoff track, “The Alley,” burrows just as deeply as the instrumental mad science of the closing “Sunshine.” In between, DeVotchKa satisfyingly scratches an itch that many folks (of a certain age, with rock-scarred-but-still-adventurous ears and a soft spot for a good string-driven crescendo) might have never known they had. And that’s pretty majestic. –WP

Tags: cdnew releasesvinyl

BUY CD HERE
BUY VINYL HERE

It is that American success that has shaped Adele’s follow-up album. It’s steeped in Southern blues, country and soul. In another singer’s hands this might seem a nakedly ambitious attempt to appeal to the American charts, but Adele makes the material sound genuine, largely because it is perfect for her. Where previously her slight, observational songs seemed barely able to carry her powerful voice, the emotional and musical heft of these styles enables her to really spread her vocal wings.

And her voice is a thing of wonder. There is warmth, power and vulnerability, sometimes in the same note. She has less of the unpredictable edge of Amy Winehouse, or the am-dram cool of Florence Welch, but she has a far greater range and subtlety than either, and hers is a voice that seems to go right to your heart.

Producers Rick Rubin and Paul Epworth have done the right thing by foregrounding that and leaving the musical background solid and unshowy. Whether she can sell American country sounds to a British audience remains to be seen, but avoiding the dancefloor pyrotechnics that so many singers are drawn to at the moment is a wise move — on this album she out-divas them all. – TT

Tags: cdnew releasesvinyl