PRESS
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Devendra Banhart | Rejoicing in the Hands
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Crutch Magazine | by Robbie MackeyHis magical ability to create rich, striking musicI stood in the middle of the room, a glass of cheap jug wine in my hand. The music perspiring from the speakers hissed with a certain worn authenticity. With an incisive age. And as the acoustic guitar line tripped over itself, as the caterwauling partition of voices trembled high above, I fell for Devendra Banhart and his beautifully peculiar 2002 debut, Oh Me Oh My. The story was simple: M. Gira had "discovered" him, a traveling troubadour on the streets of San Francisco, and quickly released a collection of capricious vignettes culled from the library of material Banhart had penned over the years. Recorded on broken four-tracks and answering machines, Oh Me Oh My. was remarkably skeletal in nature, yet compelling in its bony incompleteness. Naturally, then, Banhart's sophomore release, Rejoicing In The Hands - recorded on professional equipment, and trimly produced - is an exquisitely jarring experience. The focus is no longer on the unwieldy four-track hiss, but on the realization of Banhart's music - the not-so-tacit tribute he pays to the pastoral work of Vashti Bunyan, who guests on the album's title track, and the......
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Rejoicing in the Hands
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Mojo | by Bob Mehr16 track classic from former San Francisco art student turned NYC troubadour; second volume follows in SeptemberAlthough not clinically disturbed like fellow American outsider artists Daniel Johnston and the late Wesley Willis, 22-year-old Devendra Banhart is an unreconstructed oddball by anyone's standards. Since being discovered by Swans' leader Michael Gira in 2001, Banhart's bizarro press interviews and onstage antics have earned as much attention as his seemingly endless catalogue of fractured acoustic narratives and blues miniatures. After a pair of charmingly crude home recorded efforts, the hirsute singer-songwriter's latest pairs him with Southern studio hand Lynn Bridges and expands the sonic palette considerably - adding strings, keyboards and percussion - yet manages to retain the same woozily intimate quality as its predecessors. Casually referencing early Marc Bolan, Bryter Layter-era Nick Drake and a clutch of loping Morricone film scores, Banhart wraps his songs in a gorgeously quavering warble that seems lifted right off some blues mama's dusty 78. A nearly flawless set of left-field folk....
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Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands
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Music Spectrum | by Benjamin SquiresBanhart’s melodic poemsHe’s joining the ranks of the Jazz-influenced Rock singer/songwriters that have created quite a niche for themselves, using an approach that gives nods to both the classic jazz masters and rock’s best. He’s joining the Spectrum just up the line from Sondre Lerche, that Norwegian singer only beginning to make waves with his jazzy melodramatic tunes. He’s nearby Norah Jones who cutely caught the world by storm with Come Away with Me due in part to the help of her composer, Jesse Harris, whose solo album also resides her. He lands just ahead of Rufus Wainwright, because he’s less given to pop melodies than Rufi. He is Devendra Banhart, and his album, Rejoicing in the Hands , has hints of jazz all over the places. Its songs start and stop and begin again and pause on the edge and then keep going. Banhart is definitely a crooner, even if his voice is odd and casual and folky. Banhart wants to croon, making his voice an instrument. He plays with the melody, breaking out of rhythm as often as not, playing with the sounds and combinations of words. The jazz rhythm is most apparent......
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Devendra Banhart -Rejoicing in the Hands
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Bassheadmedia | by Ian PowerWedding voice and the guitar in extraordinary yet tangible, accessible waysWhether or not Devendra Banhart is a part of the next big movement in folk music should eventually prove to be a non-issue—unfortunately, the folk community will probably not pay much attention to Devendra Banhart, and the indie community, touters of such a premonition, will surely not pay much attention to contemporary folk. But the connection between the indie and folk worlds is evident on Rejoicing in the Hands, Banhart’s latest release. What is most interesting about Banhart is not his lyrics, which, though far from dull, seem rather pedestrian. Nor is it the music, which is not groundbreaking, but certainly ear-catching, drawing on influences that range from Harry McClintock’s countryside plucking to the intricate textures of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. What the album accomplishes is an exercise in wedding voice and the guitar in extraordinary yet tangible, accessible ways. Banhart draws a parallel to many early 20th-century composers: where Villa-Lobos and Bartók roamed their respective countrysides gathering a bevy of folk songs to be contrived and perverted into a form of nouveau nationalistic art, Banhart successfully manipulates standard songs of the American folk tradition into......
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Rejoicing In The Hands by Devendra Banhart
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Sonomu by e/nThis is really a fundamental release to have and enjoy at all momentsSince I first got the chance to listen to Devendra's 4-track single on XL Recordings (to be released as a 7" vinly) I simply could not stop playing the 20 minutes of pure mesmerizing work which opens with the astonishing 'The Body Breaks'. A week later I find myself listening to the full length album and it did not take long before I had made up my mind: this is a work of genius and it will be my favourite 2004 album (I know, we are only in May). When Young God Records boss and former Swans member Michael Gira, discovered the young prodigy Devendra Banhart, he was still "a homeless, wandering, neo-psych/folk hippie artist and musician, not yet 21". He was astonished by this quivering, high-tension wired voice that could have been recorded 70-years ago. Upon hearing his tapes, Gira apparently sent him a 10-page letter and the Texas-born (Vincent Gallo/Ian Anderson [Jethro Tull] lookalike) immediately moved from California to New York. His first release on Young God 'Oh me, Oh my...' was already a great solo work made of pieces recorded on "assorted borrowed......