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Devendra Banhart, Oh Me Oh My...
New York Observer | by Joe Hooper
Mr. Banhart’s cult status seems pretty well assured
When it comes to divas, agit-prop or otherwise, sometimes geography just raises more questions than it answers. Take the case of Devendra Banhart, a 21-year-old folk singer (I guess you’d call him) who was raised in Texas and moved with his family to Caracas, Venezuela, where, as he writes in his one-page biography, "everything’s fucked, but I love my grandmother, whom [sic] fed whiskey to me from her pinky, paid me to touch my earlobes, and let me pull her elbow flab." He wound up in a squat in New York, he says, where he came to the attention of former Swan Michael Gira’s indie-rock label, Young God Records. Mr. Gira listened to his demo tape and rushed it into production, cosmetically unretouched, as Mr. Banhart’s late October debut album, Oh Me Oh My …Walter Benjamin famously opined, "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." In Mr. Banhart’s case, his crude overdubbing on a barely functional four-track is indistinguishable from his "art naïf" persona. His songs are surrealistic one- or two-minute vignettes rendered by a single guitar and a choir of not entirely in-sync warbly tenors (the overdubbing) which at unpredictable moments will shift into a highly unsettling falsetto wail. On the new album a variety of subjects are covered, among them romance ("I know nature is beside me when he’s inside you, I feel it too"), on several occasions teeth ("Lost in the dark, lend me your teeth") and, for some reason, Michigan ("Oh, Michigan State, how I wanna live in you").
Mr. Banhart’s young career does raise the question of intentionality and self-consciousness and other subjects worthy of the next Charming Hostess album. Personally, I have no idea whether his sound comes from the open spaces and oil fumes of Texas and Venezuela or a close study of the indigenous grotesque in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and I don’t much care. The kid’s got a sound, as Bob Evans might say. In any event, with a midnight gig Nov. 27 at Williamsburg’s BQE Lounge, a return engagement at Tonic in December and a profile in the works at The Wire, the prestigious British music magazine, Mr. Banhart’s cult status seems pretty well assured. And deserved. The world should make a place for the truly unusual…