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By Dennis Cook
I should be listening to other things. Stacks of CDs sit like Bukowski’s gun-slinging poems around my room waiting impatiently for my attention, but I’m caught up in this newfangled Gnostic reverie. Equal parts hippie hoedown, Brazilian-flavored experimentation, and Donovan-ian elvish trilling, this is Banhart’s first fully formed gospel. And the freakers better listen up.
For those unfamiliar, Banhart is one of the current darlings of the indie rock set, plucked out of obscurity by the Swans’ Michael Gira in 2002 when he released Devendra’s crudely recorded demos as Oh My Oh My. Partially cooked, some tracks mere sketches running only a minute, it was still evident there was something here, but it needed to go back in the oven for a while. I peeked in at his follow-ups in 2004 and still found this graduate of SF’s Art Institute to be only occasionally inspired and still far too much like the Hurdy Gurdy man to whom he’s most often (rightly) compared. And then this rolls in. Recording for the first time in a proper studio (in Woodstock no less), sporting a cover that looks like Leon Russell and the Shelter People’s version of Sgt. Pepper, well, the hirsute minstrel has come of age.
Helmed by Pernice Brother Thom Monahan, this is gentle but rock solid, substantive with long black batting eyelashes. At 22 tracks (and a bonus CD-ROM cut), it’s overstuffed with ideas, but in this case it’s better to overreach than to suffer the dwarf-arm of most modern artists who strive only for airplay and notoriety. Banhart loves music. There’s no doubt about that. In fact, brother man loves a lot of things – longhaired girls, lazy butterflies, his native Spanish, and especially pretty elliptical syllogisms. He’s a space cowboy, but I bet a lot of folks are ready for his singular (though highly referential) form of cosmic testifying.
More than Donovan this time (who still hovers), one picks up on traces of early Gilberto Gil and Maria Bethania, Canned Heat’s bohemian blues stomp, a touch of ol’ Nick Drake, and Leon Russell himself, though not the white-haired wraith that lingers today but the inspired madman of Leon Live, the one who wrote the best tribute to Little Richard without ever saying the man’s name (“Crystal Closet Queen”). Banhart is a fellow traveler to these aliens. He’s chopping pathways through the forest so we can build a tree house together. His tales are so genuinely odd that you just have to let the overflowing imagery wash over you and smile. Some mysteries are not to be puzzled over. It’s enough that they reach their dirty fingers into the unknown. What they come back with makes for a righteous jelly with our morning toast and tea.
If there’s a better song this year than “Long Haired Child,” I haven’t heard it. It's an insanely infectious yarn about bald heads in Winter and hopes for silken-tressed children. “Queenbee” is reverb-rich acoustic country that tumbles laughing into the wild strumming and bongos of “I Feel Just Like A Child.” “Santa Maria de Feira” and “Luna de Margarita” find Banhart getting back to his Latin roots with unutterable sweetness.
While not everything works as well as these stoners think it does, there’s still an embarrassment of riches on Cripple Crow. Devendra is shaping up to be an iconoclast of the first order, an American cousin to England’s Julian Cope and Japan’s Masaki Batoh (Ghost). There’s no telling what the next section of his holy aural book will sound like, but the doctrine so far is a high-minded delight that may show up on more than a few of 2005’s "best of" lists.
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