DeVotchKa died and came back as Rebel Lounge legends

On Friday night DeVotchKa took the stage at the Rebel Lounge in the dark — which, if you know the venue, is saying something — and kicked off with the theme to the 2018 “Halloween” with frontman Nick Urata joining John Carpenter’s synth with a haunted-sounding theremin accompaniment.

Urata’s voice and the echo effects on his mic invariably make him sound like a spirit gliding through time and space, wailing gypsy poetry from the backyard of the universe. On Friday he looked as well as sounded the part of a haunt. He wore black-on-white skull makeup and a pale jacket with epaulets and embellished trim, like a deceased ringmaster. Brassist-bassist Jeanie Schroder also rocked a sugar skull look beneath the glow of Christmas lights on her sousaphone. On the kit, drummer Shawn King made an unnervingly sinister Joker (Joaquin Phoenix edition).

As the band launched into “The Alley,” Urata thanked the crowd for coming out on Halloween — a touching appreciation from a major band in a small room. The Rebel Lounge, capacity 300, was smooshed tight mostly with fans of a certain age who had indulged in some costumery for the night: a few witches, a fisherman, a strawberry, a butterfly, someone in a full-on mascot tiger getup. “We’ll make this quick,” Urata said near the top. “We’ll wrap it up and have some Halloween fun.” The promise of a short set instantly drew a good-natured “boooo!” from the back, distinct on this particular night from a good-natured boo.

Urata was mostly kidding: the show was its own Halloween fun, and if there was any question as to what kind, he took long tugs from a bottle of red between numbers. They played 12 of their songs plus two covers (the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way” was the other), a tidy set as part of a three-stop weekend mini-tour from their base in Colorado that began in Santa Fe and will wrap at Tucson’s new cathedral venue La Rosa. “This was the first town we ever came to, when we bought our van,” Urata said. Of course, people loved that. (“Thank you for coming back!” someone yelled, as if they weren’t four feet from the stage.) One pictures the temperamental yellow VW van from “Little Miss Sunshine,” the film for which they wrote the score and contributed “How It Ends,” the 2004 track with the sighing strings and pulsing melancholy keyboard line that made the band famous, or at least famous-er.

Having one of the most indelible indie groups of the century slip into a cloistered room on a witchy evening felt furtive as a seance, at turns Mexican-bright, psychedelic, dancey — and ceaselessly achey. The final song before the break, “The Enemy Guns,” displayed this full sonic kaleidoscope. “We have given our bodies / To the Mexican army / But my heart and soul / Belong to you my love,” Urata sang. “So let the enemy guns / Cut me to ribbons / For my eternal soul / Will know the way back home.” What is death, after all, but an excuse for love to burn hotter. The front man whistled the chorus against the jangle of desperado guitar licks and the wheeze of a swooning accordion.

The band dipped off stage and soon enough opened a two-song encore with, yep, “How It Ends,” Urata extending his arms to exhort the crowd into the lament of a chorus: “You aaaaaaaaaalready know … how … this … will … end.”

The Halloween of it all, the skull makeup, the echoey call mixed with 300 other voices — I’m positive some kids with a Ouija Board in an attic somewhere probably heard us piping in faintly from a radio, sounding like a ship of lost souls. As it turned out, though, we didn’t know how this would end. The band hit “Contrabanda” like a calvary crashing through a hurricane. Then they stuck around for photos and chit-chat, as Urata rakishly nursed his bottle of wine. It was a holiday.

Here was the playlist Friday:

• Halloween Theme (2018)
• The Alley
• Twenty-Six Temptations
• Queen of the Surface Streets
• Charlotte Mittnacht (The Fabulous Destiny of…)
• All the Sand in All the Sea
• 100 Lovers
• Straight Shot
• The Clockwise Witness
• Love My Way (Psychedelic Furs cover)
• Silly Boy
• The Enemy Guns
• How It Ends
• Contrabanda