Gypsy-groove hipsters DeVotchKa: Check your geographical stereotypes at the door

After 10 years as a band on the verge, DeVotchKa has finally arrived. Which may or may not be a good thing: The Denver band traffics in songs of longing and departure, chamber-pop panoramas built on violin, sousaphone, accordion, Theremin and the grand, gothic croon of frontman Nick Urata. This is a group that thrives on motion, on melodrama. Arriving anywhere might cool the fever of their sound. Thankfully, Urata refuses to relinquish his muse.

"As you get older, it's not the comfortable times you're gonna tell stories about," he said from his Denver home during a brief pit stop between a just-wrapped European tour and a gig at California's Coachella Music Festival. "It's the crazy times you're gonna look back on fondly. I've been living like that for most of my adult life, and it's a romantic thing to keep coming back to."

If you know DeVotchKa's music, chances are it's thanks to its prominent placement in "Little Miss Sunshine," the little-indie-flick-that-could that won a pair of Oscars in 2006. The soundtrack featured several songs from DeVotchKa's early albums, including the gorgeous, heartbroken "How It Ends" from their '04 album of the same name. The song, like all of their music, has an innate cinematic sweep that speaks to themes of transformation, love and loss. And travel: There's nothing like the wiry twang of a bouzouki (a type of acoustic guitar native to the Balkans), moaning accordion and mariachi horns to evoke a sense of place (or, more relevant to the band and the film, a sense of out-of-place). They all collide in DeVotchKa, the lusty sound of a Gypsy family band playing a Sicilian wedding in Paris' Left Bank. That geographically blind blend is the key to DeVotchKa's appeal, though it's also prevented easy categorization by critics and record labels.

"It's something I have to deal with practically every day, explaining what we're doing in an analytical sense," Urata said. "People want to stereotype Denver as some kind of — I don't know — mining town. In reality, there are people here from all over the world, just like any city. The geographical stereotypes don't really work. Why are we doing this sort of music from here? It's like, we didn't grow up panning gold in the stream with our grandpappies. We're musicians and we've been exposed to this stuff our whole lives and this is what fuels our fire."

Released in March, DeVotchKa's "A Mad and Faithful Telling" proves just how accessible exotic can be. And even if they finally signed to a label (L.A. based indie Anti-), are playing sold-out shows across the U.S. and Europe, and licensed "How It Ends" to Toyota and Gerber for TV commercials, the album still swoons with all the vagabond passion of their early, self-released stuff. For DeVotchKa, arrival is just another stop along the road.

Jonathan Zwickel: zwickelicious@gmail.com