Devics

When you hear something as beautiful, as haunting, as endowed with genuine emotion as the music of Devics, you can’t help but wonder how two mere mortals could have created it. Just who are these people anyway? Well, the short answer will hardly raise an eyebrow: Devics is vocalist Sara Lov and multi-instrumentalist and sometime singer Dustin O’Halloran, a musical duo from Los Angeles who found a home in Italy after signing to the UK label, Bella Union. But the complete answer is as unique and magical as anything in the history of modern music.

As unlikely as it was that Lov and O’Halloran should traverse entire continents to form a band, it seems inevitable that these Corsican twins should become romantically involved when they finally met in an art class at Santa Monica College in the mid-nineties. “We just instantly clicked,” says Lov, “We came from the same planet.” It was “purely to impress” Lov that O’Halloran first returned to the Piano, his childhood instrument, and eventually picked up guitar, bass and drums. Their physical relationship cooled a few years later but the two already “had a child together” in Lov’s words, a band called Devics, named after a little-known guardian angel.

Whether in tribute to kismet or serendipity, the group’s musical output has been as prolific as it has been magnificent ever since. On the strength of 1998’s stunning debut If You Forget Me and subsequent EP The Ghost and the Girl, ex-Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde invited Devics to sign with his Bella Union label. It proved a fitting launching pad for Devics 2001 release, My Beautiful Sinking Ship, which featured Devics combining the genre-defying, cross-era strengths of their debut with a new, harder-edged sound. O’Halloran’s now trademark jangly pianos, Parisian accordions and reverb-soaked guitar were back, but with a new intensity that lay the perfect groundwork for the ever- more cathartic vocals of Lov. An underground favorite in the States, the album proved a hit in Europe and led to a series of tours that took Devics all over Western Europe, through the Eastern Bloc and into Russia.

With their fan base now centered squarely across the Atlantic, Lov and O’Halloran moved to Italy, where noted filmmaker Giuseppe Bertolucci had made Devics a familiar name by using their music to score his 2001 film L’amore Probabilmente. Sequestered in the Italian countryside south of Bologna in a cobwebbed farmhouse a friendly promoter had lent them, O’Halloran and Lov began writing and recording music for their next release. The result, an album of mesmerizing beauty entitled The Stars at Saint Andrea, released in 2003, sealed Devics’ growing fame in Europe. No longer time-travelers, Lov and O’Halloran had completely digested their far-flung influences and reconstituted them in a wonderfully original and modern way. Favorably compared to Mazzy Star, Portishead, PJ Harvey and Throwing Muses, Devics was acclaimed across the board by the British rock mags NME, Uncut and the Times of London.

Determined to gain a foothold in their native country, Devics returned to Los Angeles in 2004 to complete work on their fourth album. Their fans will not be disappointed. Push the Heart is a revelation, a new beginning for Devics that highlights past triumphs and gives the listener a glimpse of heretofore-unseen musical destinations. Underscoring O’Halloran’s talent for combining modern-sounding production with classic chord progression is “Distant Radio,” which finds Lov riding the melodic rise and fall of verse and chorus on the poetry of intangible connections. “Song for a Sleeping Girl,” is an opportunity for the listener to relish O’Halloran’s sweet soliloquy to a napping sweetheart. Lov’s grand rumination on lost love, “Just One Breath,” is a future Devics classic with descending guitar lines that spin dark mystery, a hint of what Jeff Buckley might be up to if he’d survived the recording of My Sweetheart the Drunk. A rare gem with O’Halloran at the mic, “If We Cannot See” is a majestic waltz with a prismatic chorus that approximates Leonard Cohen fronting Coldplay.

Push the Heart will be released in the US on March 7, 2006 on Filter US Recordings. And here, in this little sliver of time called the present, the history of Devics awaits its next chapter.