Description
Label Review.
2018 album also available in Vinyl.
Our Overview.
‘This Night Falls Forever’ is the first new album from DeVotchaKa since the band released ‘100 Lovers’ in 2011. Frontman Nick Urata says he has a pseudo-photographic memory for songs that are under construction. He doesn’t have a filing system for song ideas, but he has a thousand demo recordings and a thousand pages of lyrics that he’s constantly working toward getting finished. While he might start a song, sometimes it will lay dormant for a few years, and sometimes he just has to just experience more life before finishing the writing process.
“It would come to a place on the page, and I look back now, and I just had to do a little more living before I could finish that verse,” Urata says. Many of the songs on This Night Falls Forever, which drops today on Concord Records, were written that way. And the band, which also includes Jeanie Schroder (acoustic bass, sousaphone), Shawn King (drums, percussion, trumpet) and Tom Hagerman (violin, viola, accordion, piano), hasn’t had a whole lot of time to work on albums.
The delay of the new album is due to the work load for Urata as he has been busy scoring films like Paddington and Focus, and more recently the Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events and Davy Rothbart’s forthcoming documentary, which has been described as Boyhood meets Boyz in the Hood. Hagerman has arranged music for local and national artists to perform with the Colorado Symphony while King has worked with Ozomatli’s Raul Pacheco as Los Dreamers.
“We got into this sweet spot where we were getting all kinds of collaborative offers that a band like us couldn’t resist, what we always dreamed about when we were starting off in living rooms and garages," Urata says. "And before we knew it, we were like, ‘We’ve got to finish these songs and get an album out.’”
While many of DeVotchKa’s albums have had a sprawling cinematic quality, ‘This Night Falls Forever’ might be the quartet’s most cinematic to date — not just musically, but in how it was mixed by Jason LaRocca, a film-score mixer Urata has worked with on many projects.