How It Ends by DeVotchKa

How It Ends, DeVotchKa's fourth album, came out on Cicero Recordings in 2004, following Una Volta, and it's the sound of a Denver band that refuses to be pinned to any one place or century. Nick Urata sings and plays guitar, theremin, bouzouki, piano and trumpet, Tom Hagerman saws at the violin and squeezes the accordion, Jeanie Schroder pumps away on sousaphone and double bass, and Shawn King keeps the beat, all under a name borrowed from the Russian word for "girl".

Put together, it's a swooning, windswept stew of old-world melancholy, brass-band oompah and indie rock, and the title track is a slow-building heartbreaker. That song is what finally carried the band beyond its cult following: it turned up prominently in Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, a film the band also scored, and two years later it soundtracked an ad for the Xbox 360 game Gears of War 2.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.