Devendra Banhart: What Will We Be

There really is no other purpose for this review other than to tell you that this new Devendra Hanhart record will likely meet your expectations.

My expectations were that it wouldn’t be that good but I’d find it hard* to slate someone who's just going about doing what they always intended to go about doing. Expectations: meet Mr Banhart…

I’m glad he hasn’t become a drug casualty (his performance on Later was so uncharismatic as to be off the spectrum of high and low…), well done Devendra, it must have loomed at times eh? Me, I’m grappling with the potential of reeling off a hateful scrawl about all this trustifarian-tailored Tropical Crooning, so what keeps me from becoming a hate casualty? Lack of charisma? Perhaps…

Parts of the record have a nice drift, all the time in the world. The relatively uncluttered bass and insistent cymbal of the first ninety seconds of ‘Rats’ is alright; over which his inanities seem less forceful, in the right context and contained within an appropriately secured hemp cage.

"Look Pa, a Hippy! Look Pa it’s inflating something colourful, is that some kind of tumour? What is it?" – "That’s a cheap Zeppelin son, with a target painted on it, I’ll get my .22!"

On ‘Goin’ Back’ he sings softly, close to the microphone, not dredging the personality barrel and consequently leaving a scrap or two for the guitar hooks. I like this one, it really does lay it on easy. It’s got something of The Band about it, and no jokes about his Big Pink.

And when he follows it up with another good’un, in the form of ‘First Song for B’, I can almost see beyond the image and the inflection to something very human… But even amidst the stately reverbed piano, which arrives atop the wave of a reversed sustained chord, I find myself wondering if this sincerity isn’t looking like a reality just because it stands amidst so much abstraction, a false economy if you will…

But that grand, elegiac riff is a beauty… It’s all slow motion horses and Devendra’s hollering “please destroy me” over and over and it fades out sudden and then there’s a bleak little song with rooks nattering away in the background, ‘Last Song for B’, the grey wake of pleading. It’s like a song from Nino Rojo that was left outside and after two years of trying to find its little friends it gave up and went moping along railway tracks and not eating cheese out of resentment for its successful brethren. Going back to ‘First Song for B’ I’ll get this off my chest: Why doesn’t he just make an album of depressing piano ballads (or just something different for fucks sake) and less of the cloying clever five-part shit like ‘Chin Chin & Muck Muck’. I don’t care whose neighbours make “money out of renaissance fair”.

*not so hard now:

Ok, so the hate is rearing up big time. Readers' expectations, meet incoherence. I hate this song and I think he wants me to, borderline bedroom paranoia expose: it’s the lyrics even more than the Bongo’s and the seven equally annoying genre hops, sub-Cuban when-I-was-a-young-boy-I-might-have-done-some-jazzy-homo-stuff-Jazz Trumpets, lounge piano, more tropical trust-fund monkey references, Evil lalalalalas, the kind of thing you’d cuff a Spaniard for if he whispered it into your ear in a bar, he’s the verbal equivalent of the dreadlocked dick with the Djembe.

It’s the contented, elliptical, limp-wristed, hollow-headed, animal morphing, New Age wank that really does it. If he really sees “fun everywhere”, with his thoughts being “hairs on a white, wild boar, running down the black black slopes. We’re trying not to scare the sweet prairie hogs as we descend on them like vultures through the fog”, if he really sees “fun everywhere” and is willing to “grant your every wish from my belly to your gibbous rain-bow”.

Where the fuck was I? I hate this. Taking it too seriously? And when shouldn’t we take someone ruining real fun seriously? Real fun? I mean honest-to-goodness light-hearted silliness, not desperate people shouting about how much fun they’re having while all the more sounding like a caricature of a manic-depressive... “but he’s so creative…”

It’s twisted, it’s a pose, it’s not right. Is it?

Behind all this easy-to-spit bile the music honestly makes me sad. There’s a void behind it, and it strikes me that Banhart chooses to deck it in vibrant colours and wave it about like a pair of bloomers on a giant candy cane rather than relate to it. This isn’t an argument for po-faced restraint or “authenticity”, and I fear my lack of skill presents it as such, it’s a suggestion that all this oh-so creative behaviour, the anthemic cuckoo-reggae of ‘Foolin’ included, is a waste. An academic exercise in vacuous, pseudo-unacademic posturing. Freak Folk? This is just another attention seeking child, borne of post-modernism’s highly regrettable affair with the crystal toting Shamaness of Hipsville.

Perhaps I’m out of step with the times (see: “hipsville”, “candy cane”). And I might be out of line (see: “caricature”, “void”). I’m certainly not content; sitting here flinging grave sounding shit, and I certainly don’t consider myself without posture. I met the dude in the street once, and I liked him instantly, so let me say that it’s the music and not the man at which this is aimed. Too late perhaps, can we start again?