New Release: Devendra Banhart
What Will We Be

by Charlie Gilmour

Friday October 30 2009, 12:00pm

Updated: 1:25pm

Devendra Banhart: fire dancer, acid eater, sexual deviator, cross-dressing flower child of California. Devendra Banhart: latest addition to Warner Bros. Records, the most evil business in operation since Sweeney Todd’s Hair and Beauty got shut down. How can this be?

Anyone fearing the prospect of him being morphed into a bland pop-wimp needn’t worry. Psychedelic show tunes are interspersed with creepily seductive wig outs and wonderfully whimsical ditties. Close your eyes and you can almost feel the acrid breeze of ‘Topanga Canyon’ on your skin. With the rapidly approaching Cambridge Ice Age, this is not a quality to be sneered at.

Although the aroma of fair-trade hashish on What Will We Be threatens to overpower, contemporaneous threads do occasionally break through. Whether he’s man of the moment or man out of time Banhart never fails to enchant.

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