DeVotchKa mixes up world-beat stew at World Cafe Live

The first thing to notice when watching any audience take in the Balkans-meets-Bolero cabaret of DeVotchKa is how the listeners react.

The rabidly enthusiastic throng that sold out World Café Live on Friday certainly knew the nattily dressed quartet through the use of its music in films such as Everything Is Illuminated and Little Miss Sunshine.

Still, kids and adults in the crowd quizzed their buds as to what country such beautiful, mad, bad, ethno-something music could come from. Slovakia? Greece? Mexico? France?

DeVotchKa's sound of foreign intrigue was born in Denver, in the province of Colorado. Take that, Romania.

Denver's mile-high airiness is probably responsible for giving the band's delightfully melodic arrangements such spaciousness, such epic grandeur.

For, rather than sounding kitchen-sink cluttered, DeVotchKa's combination of world-weary chanson, waltz, rai, tango, mariachi, polka, country and atmospheric pop blended ever so elegantly.

That can't be easy when the guitarist is doubling up on theremin when he isn't busy singing like Bono (at his most supple) and Slim Whitman. Or when the drummer jumps between his kit and his trumpet. Yet DeVotchKa made the whole mess effortless.

Tom Hagerman went back and forth between accordion and violin, crafting rolling, thunderous waltzes such as "Head Honcho" and gypsy-whining ballads. His pirouetting piano throughout "Along the Way" was his most potent contribution - simple and sweet.

Though she brightened the stage with a sousaphone lined in Christmas lights, Jeanie Schroder's coolest contributions came through creating dense, pliable rhythms - not just the oompah-oompah bounce usually attributed to the tubalike instrument, but a genuine, fluid pulse during every song. Schroder played stand-up bass, too, and crafted a swarming-bee buzzing during a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" that was scarier than the original.

But Nick Urata was DeVotchKa's oddest instrument - playing bouzouki like a ragged punk, toying with his theremin like a mad scientist. Mostly, though, his fragile voice was the night's spookiest highlight - cooing the high, yodeling bridges of the plucky, daydreamy "The Clockwise Witness" and haunting stately ballads such as "How It Ends."