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Devendra Banhart has been the face of the so-called freak-folk scene since its inception about four or five years ago. He’s forever championing forgotten singers (Linda Perhacs, Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan) as well as new voices (Jana Hunter, Matteah Baim, Vetiver) and acting the fool with his food-trapping beard and silly face make-up. He’s either completely fearless or completely narcissistic, and either way it’s impressive. But his records have generally left me cold, and whatever he’s accomplished as a songwriter has been zeroed out by his painfully self-conscious singing, super mannered with a vibrato as wide as Lake Michigan.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? Perhaps because the music finally matches his calculated eccentricity, I’ve been far less annoyed by this record than its more sober, focused predecessors. But the fact remains that Banhart is primarily a savvy collector–of records, of friends, of vintage clothes–rather than a creator.
