The Devastations are a velvety-blue 3-piece from Melbourne, Australia, the bar band in the after-hours hovel of regret and confusion at the back of your mind. They have, without a shadow of a doubt, ingested more Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds than you have had take away dinners, you wasters. In fact, frontman Conrad Standish looks like the bastard progeny of Mr Cave and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner, all pale chiselled features and aloof posture. And Karen O is quite the fan apparently, which I mention just to keep the pattern evolving. Hmm, that’s it though. But there is certainly more to The Devastations than vague associations with American art-rock chanteuses.
They join Beggars Banquet as the perfect compliment to the poetic red wine brooding of Crud favourites The National, sharing the same type of deeply intoned deliberations, careful musical footsteps, moody blues shuffles and introverted alt-country monologues. And while they might not exactly have the exquisite devilish musicianship of The Bad Seeds just yet – that kind of thing isn’t just arrived at overnight – they have the balance between the (bari)tone of the words and the accompanying instrumentation tuned perfectly. One, you feel, wouldn’t survive without the other.
The title track and brilliant standout ‘I Don’t Want To Lose You Tonight’, to pick two notable examples, wallow gorgeously in Chris Isaak style bourbon-tinged crooning, also recalling (as with most of the record) the closeness of Tindersticks. And while their range might be appropriately limited, always sounding desolate somehow, on ‘Take You Home’ the sedate rumblings of discontent erupt into something much more forceful, collapsing under the weight of an Afghan Whigs bellowing into a climactic welter of feedback and discord. For an adequate appraisal just refer to their name, as informative a name in fact as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to bring that aimless pattern from the first paragraph full circle.