PRESS
Devendra Banhart | Nino Rojo
...is a continuation of the lustrous, romantic minimalism that coated his peculiar, yet beautiful, first
Exquisite, distinctive beard fetishist Devendra Banhart returns with a second album in under four months. Recorded during the same sessions of his fast-gaining-notoriety UK debut, ‘Rejoicing In The Hands Of…’, ‘Nino Rojo’ is a continuation of the lustrous, romantic minimalism that coated his peculiar, yet beautiful, first.How can it fail. Banhart is rockfeedback’s self-styled ‘Man of 2004’ – whether lollingly covering Ella Jenkins’ ‘Wake Up, Little Sparrow’, singing about monkeys on the sublime ‘Little Yellow Spider’ or verbally squawking along to such brass patterns as featured in the closing embers of ‘We All Know’, it’s fascinating how diverse a collage of sentiments and emotions the simplicity of a tattered, personally-illustrated lyric-book, beguiling and quivering vocal and acoustic guitar can convey.
Banhart is an open sort of fellow, too. He doesn’t mind us peering in. ‘I want to sleep with, with, with… you,’ he bluntly exhales on ‘A Ribbon’; ‘I ain’t never coming back,’ he drops during ‘At The Hop’; ‘My cheques are also useless,’ he even suggests amidst a sumptuous Buckley-aping-Waits ‘My Ships’.
But that’s his most precious commodity – to attract, create fiction, unravel tales of nature and grandeur, through way of intimate singsong that could be taking place right beside you. Timeless is the product – after all, tracks with titles as openly medieval as ‘Owl Eyes’ and ‘HorseheadedflashWizard’ can’t be anything but.
Soulful, pure and childlike in the delivery of such innocence, Devendra Banhart is a rare enigma we don’t mind attempting to figure out. He’s worth it.