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Davendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My | Review
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NY SUN | MARTIN EDLUNDnaïve originality, as if he'd just never heard the way everybody else plays musicIf he were anything but a 21-year-old former art student living in Williamsburg, Devandara Banhart would probably be relegated to that musical Island of Misfit Toys called "Outsider Music" (joining curiosities such as Daniel Johnston, Tiny Tim and the Shaggs). Banhart has Outsider Music's endearing eccentricity and naïve originality, as if he'd just never heard the way everybody else plays music. Banhart's debut album - the unwieldily titled "Oh Me Oh My.The Way The Day Goes By the Sun is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit" released in late October - was recorded on borrowed four- track cassette recorders, giving it a charming, lo-fi quirkiness. His only instrument is an acoustic guitar; percussion consists of finger snaps and handclaps. A faint hiss of tape can be heard behind the music, just like in the old Alan Lomax Blues field recordings. The songs are simple too, though not simpleminded. "Make It Easier" consists mostly of the line "It's cold outside, we should come inside" sung as a kind of one-man round. On "Cosmos and Demos" the verses have the cadence of......
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Davendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My | Review
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www.riverfronttimes.com | John DarnielleBut the songs! How unlike almost anything else they are!Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat: If you're looking for dinner music or something to leave playing in the background while you're paying bills or figuring your taxes, stay the hell away from Devendra Banhart. Plenty of records are focus-optional -- you can choose to engage with them, or not, at will -- but Oh Me Oh My, whatever cringes its title might rightly inspire, is an all-or-nothing proposition. It requires your attention; its rewards are considerable. A lot of records sounded more or less like Oh Me Oh My back in the late '80s: audio verité experiments with plenty of tape hiss and "mistakes" intentionally left in. Some were good, some weren't; there were too many of them for a brief time, and then, for the most part, they were gone. So the "raw" quality of Oh Me Oh My is really nothing special. But the songs! And the way they're sung and played! How unlike almost anything else they are! The only points of comparison that come to mind are almost unforgivably obscure: Unbunny, Paste, John (Folk Implosion) Davis. Half......
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Larsen makes the list of the best of 2002
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LA Weeklyone of 'JOHN PAYNE'S 100 MUSICAL BIASES 2002'read more at laweekly.com...
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Devendra Banhart, Oh me Oh my…
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http://www.opuszine.comlike acid-fried bluesIn an age where so many fops and dandies are trying to sound like Mark Bolan’s glam cornerstone T-Rex circa Electric Warrior or The Slider, it’s refreshing to have young Devandra Banhart come along sounding like T-Rex’s earlier incarnation Tyrannosaurus Rex. The early Tyrannosaurus recordings were the vehicle for Bolans whimsical, elfin, folk musings, and were recorded primarily with just acoustic guitar and hand drums. If some song titles will help to paint the picture, track names off of the not-coincidentally long titled Prophets Seers & Sages the Angels of the Ages included “The Travelling Tratigion,†“Juniper Suction,†and “Scenes of a Dynasty†(each clocking in at a little more than a minute). Now if that doesn’t make you want to pull out your seven-sided dice, maybe Devandra Banhart will. Banhart’s debut album on Young God Records sounds like the home recordings of a dirty freaky hippie or an old Ohio chicken farmer putting down his keepin’-busy workin’ songs on tape. Not to give the impression that this sounds like country music, which it doesn’t, more like acid-fried blues; delightfully weird and grating in its embrace of the trebly hiss of a plastic Sears 2-track and the blaring......
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Devendra Banhart, Oh me Oh my......
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The Wire | by Jim HaynesHis raw songcraft is terrifyingly effective at communicating the breadth of human emotionThe biography accompanying Devendra Banharts debut album reveals a precocious and idiosyncratic singer/songwriter with a lot of travelling behind him. Though only 21,Banhart has crossed California desert canyons to Venezuela, where his father was imprisoned,attended a San Francisco art school,toured the frnch countryside,survived New York squats.If they fall short of crowning him as the quintessential art school flake,these details render a geophysical parallel to the emotional,linguistic and psychological fragmentation of Banharts music.Using voice,guitar,and four track,his raw songcraft is terrifyingly effective at communicating the breadth of human emotion. The set of relatively brief songs making up (to give its full title) Oh me Oh my the way the day goes by the sun is setting dogs are dreaming love songs of the christmas spirit, range over orgasmic glee,trembling sexuality,and springtime unrequited love,to delirious tirades of impotent hate and existential confusion.Central to the musics conviction,his skewed vibrato and unnerving warble recall a vocal lineage taking in pre-T Rex Marc Bolan,Syd Barrett and Karen Dalton (with his own name tacked on the end). Lyrically,his stream of consciousness logic hinges on conditional clauses that become the springboard......