The Damned's cover of "Alone Again Or" is arguably one of the five best desert-driving songs ever recorded. (It's definitely in the top 10, along with Tarnation's "Your Thoughts and Mine," Pell Mell's "Nothing Lies Still Long," the Magnetic Fields' "Born on a Train" and Wall of Voodoo's "On Interstate 15.") For years, whenever I dreamt of blasting through the Mojave in a rental car, "Alone Again Or" was the soundtrack.

And then I heard DeVotchKa's "'Til the End of Time." Logically, I know that the Denver-based gypsy-pop ensemble did not create "'Til the End of Time" using bits of the aforementioned songs (and also Johnny Cash, Ennio Morricone, Astor Piazzola and Brian Wilson's "Pet Sounds"), but my heart doesn't know better. That guileless muscle only knows that it's beating happily along with at least a dozen of its favorite songs, compressed into a highly emotional three minutes and fifty-two seconds. The mind knows it's sitting at a desk or on a bus; the heart thinks it's on the road.

I soon discovered that every DeVotchKa song draws from the same well. They've picked up notes and phrases practically everywhere, from Tijuana to Athens, and reassembled them into as lyrical an American sound as you're likely to hear. (Another Denver band, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, is much the same way; it must be the altitude.) The band's latest record, "A Mad and Faithful Telling," finds the band synthesizing their inspirations into something even more original and organic.

DeVotchKa plays the Showbox SoDo May 3. They're quite the hot item these days, being Grammy-nominated and all, and if tickets don't sell out well in advance of show day, they'll surely sell out night-of. If you don't get tickets, you should go down there anyway and hope for the best. Maybe even put an ear to the wall and feel the warmth of the high desert coming through it.

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