Banhart, Devendra / Black Babies

Young God

With a gratifying amount of interest surrounding Devendra Banhart’s debut album Oh Me Oh My The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit, Young God has harvested six new tracks from the floating and constantly replenished pool of songs at Banhart’s disposal (about 100 from which to choose at any given moment), and complemented them with two favorites from Oh Me Oh My… to make The Black Babies (UK).   But let’s cut to the chase and survey selected comments plucked from the onslaught of praise for Mr. Banhart: Using voice, guitar, and four-track, his raw songcraft is terrifyingly effective at communicating the breadth of human emotion…. Belying his uncouth and unwashed countenance, Devendra Banhart’s debut is beautiful, damaged, naked and utterly compelling. —Jim Haynes, The Wire  Take one damaged 21-year-old drifter, give him an acoustic guitar and some busted four-track recorders, and the result is a compelling mix of the eccentric and the sublime…. Certainly Devendra Banhart’s beautifully raw debut album sounds like nothing else … more than just spittle in the face of an over-processed music industry. Soulful, troubling and troubled, it’s a spiritual manifesto from a one-man species. —Neva Chonin, San Francisco Chronicle  It’s the voice that pulls you in, flitting from lilting to hectoring, sweet to sinister…. He could be Barrett-era Syd possessed by the soul of Tiny Tim … an album that escapes definition, beguilingly sweet, yet ever so, ever so dark. —Andrew Male, Mojo  The quaver in Mr. Banhart’s voice is as shaky as his songs’ connection to everyday reality. In lo-fi recordings — usually just his guitar and his multiplied voice — his songs and fragments ponder animals, apparitions, logical leaps and childlike certainties, all with credible eccentricity. —Jon Pereles, The New York Times  Itty-bitty scraps of thoughts/impressions, poetic prose in simple frames of spidery acoustic guitar and a startling voice that warbles high, fretful and foreboding — vulnerable, of course, but comforting, too … loads of actually fantastic guitar picking and several thrillingly unconventional song shapes … but what in lesser hands would be merely irritating is in Devendra’s undeniably authentic and even authoritative. Oh Me Oh My… sets new (its own) standards; by the end of one spin, it’s not weird at all, more a darkly angelic kind of beautiful. —John Payne, LA Weekly

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