PRESS
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Devendra Banhart at Tonic, NYC
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‘Sup | by Catherine Despontlive InterviewI remember the first time I heard Devendra Banhart. It was one month to the day before this interview, January 16, sometime before 11AM, as I arrived at the ‘Sup office. Marisa had just gotten the album from Young God Records and was giving it a listen. It took me less than half a song to be swept away by it, because enjoying Devendra’s music is like reading a great book: It can carry you off and set you down in a different universe, but you need to be a reader. His music isn’t esoteric, but it is mysterious and requires that you be willing to follow his lead. Although it engulfed me immediately, I could also see why someone might not be taken up by it. The album, Oh Me Oh My the Way the Day Goes By the Sun is Setting Dogs are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit, is an eccentric collection of hand clapping, guitar picking, whistles, and the sweetest singing followed by occasional shouts. The songs, conceived as demos, were recorded on warbling four-tracks and many of them die within 30 seconds. They could be compared to folk music the......
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Devendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My | Review
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FreshAngels.com | Donna Loffredohe is entirely his own artistDevendra Banhart's distinctive voice and surrealist lyrics blend to make a musical code that is initially overwhelming. But once the code has been cracked, the songs settle in with surprising ease. The 22 songs on the run-on titled Oh Me Oh My ... The Way The Days Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit turn out to be satisfying and even revelatory at times. Devendra Banhart's non-rational musings may be hard to penetrate, but there is a glimmer of profound meaning through the nonsense. Is he really singing about pumpkin seeds and sea salt and lots of teeth? Sure he is; there is nothing contrived about this artist. But you can't entirely dismiss lyrics like "my love has my favorite ears/they lean forwards when she hears." Sometimes it's hard to believe that Devendra Banhart has been living in the this world. When he sings "Well you certainly are nice people!", he sounds as though he is terrified by and intent on terrifying these "nice people." He seems much more at ease when singing about the gloves he lost "on the way to the make believe......
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Devendra Banhart, Oh Me Oh My...
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BOSTON GLOBE | by TRISTAM LOZAW Show previewDevendra Banhart is a peculiar, maybe visionary, folk-blues pixie whose surreal 22-song debut often seems the work of an enchanting victim of flower-child psychosis. In Banhart's world of gentle grotesques and fractured whimsy, a lone acoustic guitar accompanies his glam-falsetto warble that matches T. Rex's Marc Bolan with the wild diva quivers of Diamanda Galas. Admirers add Pink Floyd savant Syd Barrett to the comparisons, while detractors think of an Adam Sandler routine. Using secondhand cassette decks, the 21-year-old New Yorker made these raw recordings "for himself" - and it shows. The lo-fi overdubs aren't in sync; the cheap tapes' flutters add odd tonalities; and hand claps and whistles sub for "real" orchestrations. In this unsanitized format, Banhart's quirks can't be squashed. Absent is self-consciousness to color the bizarrely organic allure of his anxious lullabies, or filter the shameless eccentricity of fragile freak-show melodies like "Happy Happy Oh," an unsettling take on coming out of the closet. Banhart won't float everyone's boat. His unpolished odes to "Nice People" and "Legless Love" are as nightmarish as they are compelling. Banhart performs Monday at the Chopping Block in Brigham Circle....
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Devendra Banhart, Oh Me Oh My...
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Rolling Stone | by David FrickeDevendra is a young Texan of strange voice and blown mindDevendra Banhart is a young Texan of strange voice and blown mind. He sings in a nasally boyish croon with outbreaks of curdled falsetto and writes short bursts of skeletal melody and run-on surrealism. Recorded with dictaphonelike fidelity, Oh Me Oh My . . . is lonesome fire in the anguished tradition of Skip Spence's Oar and Syd Barrett's breakdown records. There is also a whiff of prewar country blues, of raw materials and experience, in Banhart's miniatures of rapture and dislocation. Banhart sounds like he's strolling along the edge of madness, but his magnetic crudity makes perfect sense....
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Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home
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AQUARIUS RECORDSAnother incredible, dignified release from M. GiraWith the third Angels Of Light album "Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home," Michael Gira has succeeded in severing the major ties to his former Swans, a band which admittedly underwent several distinct stylistic shifts in its 15 year lifespan. A few strands obviously remain, as Gira's voice is still central to his music, a proud and defiant baritone responding to the catastrophes of Gira's world, self-created or otherwise. Beyond his voice, fleeting reflections of the hypno-rock grooves of Swans' mid period albums "White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity" and "Love Of Life" manifest themselves in the self-described 'lonesome angry cowboy productions' of The Angels Of Light. As powerful and magnificent as the Swans were in the '80s and '90s, the suffocating abjection of those albums rendered them a climactic exaggeration of spectacle and theatricality. Don't get me wrong, "Filth" and "Children Of God" are still two of my most treasured (if that's the right word) albums. It's just that in Angels Of Light, Gira has eased up on some of the control tactics and allowed for his emotional core to speak unrestrained by the artistry of his productions. While......