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Sweet singers
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San Francisco Bay Guardian | by Johnny Ray HustonDevendra Banhart and Bill Berkson build a new alphabetONE FINE SPRING day three years ago, I went along with a friend when he read to Bill Berkson's poetry class at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was there I heard Devendra Banhart for the first time. Banhart wasn't bearded then, and the kinetic energy of his songwriting hadn't quite grown into the roving splendor found on his debut album, Oh Me Oh My ... The Way the Day Goes by the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit. Still, it was a first impression that lasted. This kid, I thought, is going places. Since Oh Me Oh My's release, Banhart relocated to New York City and brought a vagabond's spirit to the touring life of a musician. His recent return to San Francisco – and the arrival of his new album, Rejoicing in the Hands (Young God) – seemed an excellent opportunity to reunite the truant but talented former student and a favorite teacher. Professor of liberal arts at SFAI, Berkson sharpened his verbal, poetic, critical, and stargazing skills with the late Frank O'Hara, and his latest collection......
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Devendra Banhart Sings New Songs For Unborn Children & Yoga Moms
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Performer Magazine | by Darby BeckRejoicing in the HandsIn 2002 Devendra Banhart took the music world by surprise. A traveling hippie with a guitar and a singularly odd voice and wholly original lyrical take on the world, he was selling homemade recordings at this shows. Shows that were quite a sight. “A show for me then was different situation. I t was like a freakout exercise, I’d drink a full bottle of wine and hold up the guitar and screech.†Banhart’s recordings were the essence of lo-fi, done “for a few friends†on broken 4-tracks in other people’s living rooms (as he didn’t have one at the time) and on friend’s answering machines. “Somehow Michael [Gira] got it,†says Banhart. “Sending it to labels was the most absurd thing in the world. No one would want to release it - but Michael did and didn’t want to make a record, he just wanted to release it as it was.†The album, Oh Me, Oh My ..., on Gira’s label Young God Records, was a critical coup, Banhart charmed the most cynical of music writers, who were all the more humbled for having made assumptions about a hippie and his guitar.......
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Side Stage
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Village Voice | by Andy BetaDevendra Banhart Rejoicing in the Hands The hiss of four-track airs may have been scrubbed off of Devendra Banhart's follow-up to his lo-fi Oh Me Oh My . . . debut, but plenty of grimy atmosphere remains. Recorded down in muggy-buggy 'Bama mud in 12-hour marathons, Rejoicing in the Hands flutters between warbling whimsy and dirty fingernails. You get 16/57ths of the songs he originally submitted (with another 16/57ths due in September). His song-y motes get buffed to a sheen by cello, drums, and marimba, courtesy of Michael Gira's Angels of Light, coating them into pearls (before, Swans). Sometimes it's just clean picking and that old, weird (South) America of his voice. Watery, lemony, brassy, froggy, foggy, wispy, slippery, it's mostly Marc Bolan-y, even when singing baloney lyrics about Elvis's hit discography. Previously invoking "men" like Tiny Tim and Syd Barrett, Devendra's more feminine turns now conjure the grittier Karen Dalton and uh . . . Ethel Merman? Writhing underneath are uncountable hands, extraneous phalanges, datable teeth, and hair as insect eyes, to say nothing of the throat of English sprite Vashti Bunyan. In the glorious 1:41 title track, hers is a voice from the......
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So Righteous to Love
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Arthur Magazine #10 | by Trinie DaltonDevendra Banhart is here and he plays folk music. Trinie Dalton finds out where he’s coming from.A few months ago I hiked high on mushrooms in the Redwoods, and Devendra Banhart’s first album served as my bridge between fantasy and reality. His music isn’t about tripping out on drugs--I’m not belittling it that way--but its soothing quality makes one feel peaceful in any state of mind. As I interviewed him over the phone in late February about a myriad of topics, Devendra often returned to talking about folk music’s universality, about how one of its most noble purposes is to make listeners feelcomfortable. Hearing 23-yr-old Devendra talk like this reminded me of how closely related late-1960s psychedelic rock bands were, in spirit and sense of idealism, to the folk singers Devendra loves so much from the same period: their considerations forlistening toandhearingmusic were at the forefront of their playing. But Devendra’s tastes extend into the present, and there appears to be just as many neo-psychedelic musicians playing today as there are neo-folk rockers. Is it due to the current abominable political state? I don’t know. I didn’t care to discuss politics with Devendra because......
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Rejoicing in the Hands
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Dustedmagazine.com | by Michael CrumshoOne of my favorite albums of the yearPossessed with a nimble fingers and quivering vibrato, Devendra Banhart's approach to both British and American folk forms catapulted him to the forefront of a burgeoning folk set faster than you could say "revival." He wowed Young God head Michael Gira with a clutch of homemade tapes recorded over the course of his travels that later became his debut, Oh Me, Oh My.... Granted, while his skills and craft as a songwriter were generally excellent, the tunes were sometimes aimless, locking in on his high-pitched braying and tape hiss that sometimes threatened to strangle his songs. Rejoicing in the Hands, his second proper full-length (and the first of two slated for release this year), comes as a bit of a shock, then. Any waifish naiveté or lingering lo-fi has been ditched. In fact, it sounds almost as if Banhart has aged ten years in the past two. What the record represents is a distillation of the material he presented earlier. Recorded with Lynn Bridges over the course of a couple weeks in his living room in Georgia, the tracks here feel more intimate and yet still spacious, framed by......