DeVotchKa – 100 Lovers

From the string swells of opening track The Alley, DeVotchKa make it clear they're thinking big on this, their sixth album proper; a widescreen opus recorded in the Arizonan desert and clearly taking many of its cues from the band's recent soundtrack work.

Such an expansive sound pays off on tracks like All The Band In All The Sea which deploys a relentless piano motif to sweep the listener to a heady emotional crescendo, but elsewhere, as on the plodding Exhaustible it's clear that they've ironed out too many of the odd little creases that made their sound so interesting in the first place.

Too often the band aim for gravitas but only manage a kind of vague stateliness; they're really at their best – and sound most like an actual band – on the intoxicating The Man From San Sebastian, which plays out like David Bowie fronting a Romani/surf fusion group. [Mark Shukla]