Devendra Banhart's latest
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I reviewed Devendra's latest album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon last week for Dusted -- and also did an interview with him (which isn't finished yet and won't run for a while). Here's a bit from the review:Over the last few years, Devendra Banhart has evolved from a fragile outsider artist, recording on other people's answering machines (Oh Me Oh My), to a favored protégé of Swans/Young God's Michael Gira (Rejoicing in the Hands, Nino Roja), to the acknowledged center of the freak-folk universe (Cripple Crow), to, finally, the oddball connection between people as disparate as Beck, Karl Lagerfeld, Gael Garcia Bernal and Vashti Bunyan. His latest incarnation and fifth album, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, is not, perhaps, as seamlessly lovely as Rejoicing in the Hands. It is not as utterly unique and self-revealing as Oh Me Oh My. It rambles all over the place, in terms of genre and influence, as Cripple Crow did, and there are a few cringe-worthy moments ("Shabop Shalom" is pretty bad). And yet to complain about excesses or discontinuity or questionable judgment is to miss the whole point. This is Devendra Banhart…eclectic and whimsical and poking genres with a stick to see if they'll bite. It's a little mad, a lot overstuffed, and probably a degree or two calculated. Still it's intermittently very beautiful – and what other artist can count Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson and Gael Garcia Bernal as backup players? (The rest is here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3831)
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