Good Night Tonight: Devotchka & Crooked Fingers(!)

Dammit, this cold-from-hell thing is getting really annoying. If I the fam weren’t still wiped out by this thing, I’d be seriously considering getting my ass up to the Warehouse Live tonight (Mon., February 9th) to catch Devotchka and Crooked Fingers…

I’m not super-familiar with Devotchka, admittedly, but I like what I’ve heard so far — bizarro, fractured-glass, gypsy-orchestra cabaret music that brings to mind a more melancholy/murky Gogol Bordello, the Buena Vista Social Club ensemble, David Byrne, or David Ouimet’s Motherhead Bug project, all in relatively equal parts. (You can listen on the band’s Website here & see for yourself if I’m just making shit up.) “How It Ends”, in particular, is damn beautiful, and I like the pre-war Berlin feel of the music as a whole; nicely atmospheric and strange.

All that said, though, the real draw for me would be Crooked Fingers, the solo-project-run-amok of ex-Archers of Loaf maestro Eric Bachmann. I’m not so keen on the snippet I’ve heard off new album Forfeit/Fortune, “Phony Revolutions”, in large part because the Latin melody sounds a heck of a lot like Mark Anthony’s “I Need to Know.” Which, I’m sorry, but: eww. C’mon, man…I can’t get past that.

But hell, I’ll forgive the man who crafted 2003’s awesome, epic Red Devil Dawn, 2001’s intensely gorgeous Bring On The Snakes, and “New Drink for the Old Drunk” off his self-titled 2000 debut a great many things, and I’m okay with this being one of ’em. This time ’round, Bachmann’s transmuted Crooked Fingers into an actual band, which may account for some of the metamorphosis in sound, but I think he’s actually been veering away from the moody prettiness and towards more explicitly Springsteenian/Dylanesque rock for some time now; see most of 2005’s Dignity And Shame for proof of that. And he’s darn good at it, too.

Honestly, if I could, I’d go see Crooked Fingers tonight and be that annoyingly belligerent fanboy in the front who knows every old song and keeps yelling for the band to play it: “Play ‘You Can Never Leave,’ you jerks! You think anybody wants to hear this new shit, seriously? How ’bout ‘Disappear’, then? ‘Surrender Is Treason’! Come on!”

So, if anybody out there wants to go & play that part in my stead, by all means… (Doors at 7PM, show at 8PM, by the by.)