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Devendra Banhart, Oh Me Oh My...
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Pennyblackmusic.com | by Anthony Dhanendran He has quite a voice and when he puts it to good use the effect is astonishingDevendra Banhart : Oh Me Oh My The Way The Day Goes Starting off with some Bert Jansch-like guitar, Devendra Banhart’s album draws you in slowly, moving on swiftly via some found noises and random sounds, to two perfectly formed acoustic ditties, before swerving way off into the leftfield again on ‘Nice People…’, with its cackling chorus, “We certainly are nice peopleâ€, both disorienting and at the same time lulling the listener. It continues like this for the rest of the album, careering between the more accessible straight songwriting and the stranger parts of young Devendra’s imagination. Mostly it’s good quality folkish music along the lines of Nick Drake, the aforementioned Jansch and tending towards the current New York antifolk music of Jeffrey Lewis or the Moldy Peaches. It’s all recorded on cheap equipment and cheaper tapes, meaning plenty of surface noise for that extra authenticity so craved by the antifolk movement. Actually, it’s probably more just feeling that “it feels better that way†to release the tracks without any mastering, editing, redubbing or rerecording. It pays off in......
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The simple challenges of Devendra Banhart
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The Herald-Times | by David CoonceHis music comes from a place that is unbelievably pureThis week the Library of Congress announced that it had selected 50 recordings that would be preserved in order to start a national registry of important recordings. The list is impressive in breadth and quality, encompassing such diverse artists as Scott Joplin, Abbott and Costello, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It is an ultimate one-stop list of all the important milestones in our nation's history, both musical and otherwise, and serves as a fascinating document of the last century, revealed through the myriad sounds captured on wax cylinders, reel-to-reel tapes, vinyl LPs and CDs. If there was another of these lists published in 50 years, one Devendra Banhart might well be on it. His music comes from a place that is unbelievably pure, immune from any sort of music scene. It is some of the most honest music that you'll ever hear, and literally sounds as if it could have come from any time, any place. Devendra Banhart is a 21-year-old New-Yorker-by-way-of-Texas whose new album, Oh Me Oh My … is a staggering work of unstable brilliance. Banhart......
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OH ME OH MY ... | Devendra Banhart
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Waterfront week/St. louis | by ERIC R. DANTONOne of the most fascinating records this yearOne of the most fascinating records this year comes from Devendra Banhart, a 21-year-old wanderer as eccentric as anyone who has ever picked up an acoustic guitar. With a quavery voice, lyrical non sequiturs and meandering acoustic guitar, the Texas-born musician evokes Syd Barrett and very early Marc Bolan on the 22 tracks that make up his debut, "Oh Me Oh My ..." The songs are unprocessed, stream-of-consciousness missives that Banhart made for himself on borrowed four-track cassette recorders while he drifted haphazardly from San Francisco to Paris, Los Angeles to New York. Friends persuaded him to seek a wider audience, and those raw demos became "Oh Me Oh My ..." "My first impulse on hearing these songs might have been to take him into a studio and `produce' a record for him, but the more I thought about it, the less sense it made," Michael Gira, head of Young God Records, wrote in the press notes accompanying the album. Despite the scratchy sound - calling it lo-fi is generous; "handmade" is more accurate - and the occasional bang from fireworks, gunshots (really) or other unintended......
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Devendra Banhart – Oh Me Oh My… LP
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www.noreasterzine.com | MHis freakishly unique in it's creepy beauty"A god send, if a bit touched," I think that’s how I might describe Devendra Banhart from hearing Oh Me Oh My. Every song here is a lo-fi guitar and vocals classic, on par with Michelle Shocked’s Campfire Songs -- but no, much, much better. One of Banhart's talents is his ability to combine off-hand humor with sad, old America guitar work and eerily surreal vocals: "i know nature's beside me when he's inside you/ i feel it too." Yes, bizzare lyrics abound. I found myself asking aloud, "is he kidding?" I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted him to be. All in all, he seems sincere, and so the lyrics appear to be his own organic personal imagery rather than some labored mechanical construct or a simple, dumb joke. In this respect, the album has as much in common with the unfettered intimacy of John Frusciante's Usually Just a T-Shirt as it might appear to have with traditional folky albums. Oh Me Oh My is freakishly unique in it's creepy beauty. Go out and get this record, and don’t share it with anyone....
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Michael Gira + Devendra Banhart, Bush Hall
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Time Out London | by Sophie HarrisLive reviewPeople vomited when they say Michael Gira’s Swans play live in the mid ‘80s.. With droning washes of guitar, the NYC industrial punk pioneers set out to make the loudest noise possible; so loud, in fact, that it tended to vibrate the audience members’ internal organs (one TO staffer has a friend who’s deaf in one ear to this day as a result). Fuck. And while Gira’s latest project Angels of Light deals in gauzy, fragile melodies and whispers – check new release ‘Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home’ (Young God) – the aaargh-you’re-fucking-with-my-mind aesthetic persists. Thankfully. The whispers and chimes on tracks like ‘Palisades’ soothe and lure you into the land of doze, only to build to a hypnotic, mind-monging climax of hummed noise. Less enervating, and certainly more delightful, is Gira’s Young God Records protégé Devendra Banhart, who supports tonight. This feral, sinewy creature from Brooklyn released his debut LP ‘O Me O My…’ earlier this year, and crafts deliciously black folkish songs that recall Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ as much as they do Banhart’s beloved Greenwich village singing muse Karen Dalton. Songs like ‘Michigan State’ lace fondant soft melodies with scrappy......