Sections of the music industry would have you believe that Devendra Banhart represents some kind of musical Second Coming, acting as a lightning rod for harnessing cosmic spirituality and leading us all to a neo-hippy psychedelic heaven on earth. The press release for ‘Nino Rojo’ includes this telling declaration from Banhart himself:
“REJOICING IN THE HANDS OF THE GOLDEN EMPRESS is the MOTHER, is the SUN, she is observing, having already experienced, commenting, This is this…this is that, NINO ROJO is the CHILD! RED SUN/SON! Not observing but participating, Exuberant and Foolish he begins his journey ONWARD! Rejoicing is the MOTHER, Nino is the SON! YES! THIS TRUE NO!? YES IT IS!”
Which is stuff and nonsense as far as I’m concerned, as is most of the lyrical outpourings that fill this partner to ‘Rejoicing In The Hands’, the album released earlier this year. The tracks on both albums were recorded during the same two week session using old recording equipment set up in the living room of a large house in Georgia.
So among the 16 tracks on show we get the sounds of birds and cicadas in the background as well as the ‘noises’ that Banhart emits before a couple of his songs: no doubt an ectogentic side-effect to allowing his quasi-spiritual muse to enter his body and use him as a willing mouth-piece to utter such utter drivel as, “hey there Mr. Happy Squid, you move so psychedelically, you hypnotise with your magic dance all the animals in the sea” (‘Little Yellow Spider’); and, “now when my smells grew some new smells, and I just couldn’t smell them all, la de dah de dah de dum” (‘Island’); or, “I want to live in Jamaica, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” on ‘Good Red Road’, a song that plays like a 3rd-rate out-take from some future ‘Lost Recordings’ that only a die-hard completist could possibly find of interest.
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That Banhart has been mollycoddled and cocooned so closely by the people around him smacks of a non-judgemental parent smiling on indulgently at the performance of their precocious child, who they’ve deluded into the self-belief that their immature and pretentious outpourings are somehow revelatory and important.
Barnhart’s irksome vocals recall Marc Bolan, Tim Buckley and Donovan but not in a way that could be remotely described as pleasant or meaningful. On the plus side his guitar playing – particularly the finger-plucking - is exemplary. Musically, he travails the blues as well as folk but his good ear for a tune is constantly drowned out by those lyrics and that irritatingly mannered singing voice.
All in all the tiresome waffling of a retro-hobo-folkie, achieving nothing more than emphatic affirmation for John Lydon’s quip: ‘Never Trust A Hippy’.
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