Music

Devendra Banhart

By Adam R. Macgregor

The alt-rock press would have you believe that Devendra Banhart is an eccentric genius of verse and poesy. He's also a funny little guy who once said in an interview that he wrote his first song at age nine about the family dog getting plastic surgery so that it more resembled his grandmother (a true story, he claimed). Somehow, over his four-record output for NYC-based Young God Records, he's managed to resolve these two disparate sides of his artistic persona to the delight of many a discriminating fan of the post-Nick-Drake-in-a-VW-commercial singer/songwriter phenomenon.

Nino Rojo picks up roughly where its stronger predecessor, Rejoicing in the Hands , left off. Considering the content of the two albums were whelped from one studio session, one might chalk this inconsistency up to a faulty attempt at compiling two perfect mix-tapes. Regardless, Nino Rojo is by no means a half-hearted effort, though it lacks some of Rejoicing 's joyous spontaneity in favor of a more introspective tone.

The album finds Banhart's spare, but deft, fingerpicked guitar and alien vocal (think Billie Holiday-sultry trailed by a warbling, Jello Biafra vibrato) backed at various points by strings, upright bass, percussion and piano. "We All Know" evokes the faux ragtime of Rejoicing 's "This Beard is for Siobhan." Likewise, Banhart's bizarre lyrical vision remains intact throughout the new album. It takes some kind of craft to utter lines like

"Hey there little sexy pig, you made it with a man/and now you've got a little kid with hooves instead of hands" (from "Little Yellow Spider") without sounding like a full-bore weirdo.

That introspective quality gets its due on the Tom Waits-esque "At the Hop," written and performed with Vetiver's Andy Cabic and augmented with a gentle cello harmony. The back-porch lullaby of "Water May Walk" furthers that intimacy with plinks of glockenspiel, not-quite-tuned piano and background bird songs. Conversely, Banhart's most "rock" moment to date, "Be Kind," trots along with a prominent drumbeat and an electric guitar vamp that could have been lifted from a Motown session.

Banhart thanks the Alan Lomax collection in the liner notes of Nino Rojo . After a listen, it's evident that Lomax's exhaustive chronicle of American Folk Music for the Library of Congress holds an undeniable influence over the scruffy songwriter/wanderer's work. It's an affinity Banhart seems to assert with the album's opener, a cover of Ella Jenkins' "Wake Up, Little Sparrow". Indeed - in some 1950s alternate reality - the flag-hippie for what's emerging as a straight-up revival could very well have his own pleasant oddities counted amongst specimens of folk Americana .