Banhart, Devendra / Oh Me Oh My... The Way The Day Goes By The Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs Of The Christmas Spirit

Young God

To say Devendra Banhart is unique is an absurd understatement. When I first heard the voice of this completely unknown, precociously talented 21-year-old songwriter, I could not believe it. His occasionally warbling falsetto is alternately bizarre, comical, and often a little frightening. Coupled with his advanced finger-picking guitar style - which itself often veers schizophrenically from gentle grooves into jolting, non-rhythmic stabs and weird harmonic flights of chaos - and the wildly surreal nature of his truly exceptional lyrics, each of the 21 songs on this CD (some of which clock in at about 30 seconds) contain their own special drama and immediately memorable melodies - no mean feat when your instrumentation is acoustic guitar and voice, with only the occasional hand clap or whistle thrown in as "orchestration." In a popular music environment inundated with computer and electronically generated sound and sanitized ProTools mixes, it's a tremendous relief to hear something so ridiculously compelling, low-tech, utterly personal, and hand-made. The songs were recorded on various borrowed and usually broken 4-track cassette recorders by Banhart himself in various haphazard locations around the globe. These recordings were made solely for himself, and they're better for it - devoid of any self-consciousness or artifice, just utterly personal and idiosyncratic, magically twisted and imaginative.  All kinds of comparisons that might be relevant in describing Banhart - from Marc Bolan's pre-T. Rex recordings to Daniel Johnston, to Nick Drake's inner purity and pathos, to Karen Dalton (one of Banhart's idols).

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