Devendra Banhart's "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon"

In the past few years, Devendra Banhart seems to have become the indie world's pet hippy, a benign prankster who radiates love for music, spiders, humanity, his beard, and the vast array of fine artists he has nurtured, played with and championed over the past five years. I can't think of many other musicians in that time who have informed my taste so much, whose proselytizing have turned me on to so much great music.There's a danger, though, that maybe people don't take Banhart seriously enough. That his open-hearted cheerleading and kindergarten flights of fantasy leave him looking substantially more lightweight than he really is.Hopefully, "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" should remedy that. It's a very long record, and there's still a fair bit of mucking about on it. But at heart, this is a beautifully-realised piece of work: an album recorded in LA's Topanga Canyon that taps into the local vibes (the airy, dislocated majesty of David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" is a key text here) and Banhart's South American heritage (on the likes of "Samba Vexillographica", he emerges as a potent heir to Caetano Veloso) to describe the end of a love affair.For a full preview of this, I'm afraid you'll have to go to my "Wild Mercury Sound blog":http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=6&p=391&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more391