Listening to Devendra Banhart’s new album is sort of like reading an epic in a language that you don’t understand. Large musical gestures are made, but they are incomprehensible; you sense what could be the grandness, but miss the impact as it is executed in a foreign manner.
There are huge languid flourishes where a climax of noise is matched by a throbbing hum, indicating the listener is supposed to assume something invisible and devastating is taking place. Multiple “far away lands” are mentioned, as well as long contemplations over simple moments of sunrises and sunsets. Yet one feels that Banhart is trying to communicate something through too broad a medium or too indulgent a method. It’s throughout the winding narratives, the up-tempo guitar solos and the jamming keys on a deafening church organ that something in the swelling accumulation of noise threatens to expand beyond the meaning, and the impact of the track is lost.
There is also an odd sort of subject matter switch on “Smokey” compared with Banhart’s earlier work. Gone are the days of fingers and toes running off in jealousy to finger-picking folk melodies. His typical warped children’s tales are now replaced by very adult ruminations on jilted attraction. His stories, now from the perspective of a dejected mistress, a rolling preacher or a dancing rabbi, are related with drawn out piano ballads and with multilingual crooning about love lost or “dying of loneliness.”
Keeping with the shift toward adult subjects, Banhart even affects a falsely deepened, “Masterpiece Theater” tone on tracks like “Seahorse.” There, his lyrics of “well I’m scared of ever being born again, if it’s in this form again” ring with mock-maturity. One could only hope that in the future all jukeboxes with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” will be replaced with this instead.
And yet the lyrics seem to have simplified when viewed against songs like “At the Hop” off “Nino Rojo” or even the nouveau hippie anthem of “Long Haired Child” off “Criple Crow.” This is understandable when keeping in mind Banhart’s new musical forms are mainly of the simple melody or call and response variety. Doo-wop, samba and sermon all make an appearance on “Smokey” with Banhart making a convincing show of aping nearly every American, South American and Silver Lake American cultural form.
The talent needed to simultaneously pull off these drastically different styles is unmistakable, and it proves interesting enough to hear Banhart’s undulating croon mix with styles from the darkest corners of the world. Even the wailing preacher on “Saved” sounds legitimate enough to be mistaken for a Bad Seeds gospel rework, though Banhart’s warbling rooster call remains attributable to him and him alone.
In shifting the focus from his usual subjects, Banhart seems to lose the thread of his original intention. “Smokey” has moments of genuine ethereal greatness, where the ambient noise of groaning spirit-whispering matches with Banhart’s former mantras to create a new musical outlet, but there are most certainly the misses to match.
Perhaps if this were a concept album about American history, with the time-traveling inconsistencies of switching continents, voices, personas and languages mid-song, this wouldn’t come off as so accidentally experimental. But despite the album’s difficulties, I have to be glad there is still someone digging through the graves of old Americana, looking for the sway of Elvis Presley but ending up nearer to the gaudy lean of Lisa Marie Presley.
““ Casey Henry
E-mail Henry at chenry@media.ucla.edu.