Every television show music supervisor should have Devics’ “Push the Heart” in tow for all those sad scenes involving matters of the heart. This moody, delicate music is perfect soundtrack material, not in that schmaltzy, sappy vein, but because it can (if you let it) push all of your bluer emotional buttons.
The album starts a tad abruptly, throwing you right into its darkish colors and slightly desperate poignancy with lyrics like lie to me/make like you love me and the gently cascading piano lines of Dustin O’Halloran while the cloudy-sweet voice of Sara Lov puts ideas of Chan Marshall and Mazzy Star in your head. Throughout, Devics send your senses afloat with their watery music and images.
As the tracks swim by you, they do start to unmoor from the strong momentum and deeper variety of a great album. The lull you feel from their beautifully orchestrated songs, much of which comes from the frequent use of a gently rocking waltz beat (in threes), can either enrapture you or put you to sleep. But close to every song is saved from being lost as mere variations on a theme of sweet, sad and bitter. Devics usually manage to pull you back in, especially in the choruses of their songs, with something harmonically interesting or the perfect placement of a trumpet or a cello. An arresting image is conjured or a few lines of lyrics come together in bloom. All this is hard to miss in the rising impressionistic lines of “A Secret Message To You” which burst onto the scene like hazy sunlight on a hot air balloon, or the swirly, slightly menacing organ that creeps into the very Radiohead-esque “Just One Breath,” or the joining of voices at precisely the right moment to declare a chorus in “Song for a Sleeping Girl.”
“Push the Heart” is Devics’ fourth album and the band, currently based in Los Angeles and Italy, is at this point probably better known abroad. Hopefully this will change soon and more of us States-side will turn to them for music held in lovely suspension, and one day perhaps even feel slightly ridiculous for being so affected when a scene from that silly TV show comes on with Devics’ songs wafting over it. |