Devendra Banhart
Cripple Crow

THE REVIEW

An album I want to immediately call "epoch-making" because it's one of the few that has made me fall back in love with a certain lo-fi folk, a certain way of conceiving music, and not least, a way of life that I had put aside. I'm talking about certain hippie communes that were so fashionable at the beginning of the '70s (communes which I never attended or shared except through the reflected experience of my older brother, then a true adept of the Movement). It's a surprisingly varied and eclectic album, although built on few chords and minimal technical refinements (no sampling, no electronic gimmicks and probably very few or no overdubs) that brings us back a fragile and poor folk-singer, in its positive exceptions, capable of conveying profound emotions through 22 (I repeat twenty-two!!) tracks that more or less encompass the entire historical folk knowledge from early Bob Dylan to Tim Buckley, from Nick Drake to Woody Guthrie, filtering everything through the lightness and sunniness of exotic rhythms of samba, calypso, and pure rock'n'roll, with songs sung half in American and half in Puerto Rican.

A small Woodstock-like community encapsulated in just over 75 minutes of dance, made of carefreeness, joy, freedom, participation, and disengagement which, in a musical era like this one, made of calculations, business, promotions, television appearances, and various gigs, represents a great breath of fresh air for the spirit (and for the ears!). It's not so much the purely musical aspect that strikes (after all, these are simple and well-crafted country-folk songs) but it's the general freaky and psychedelic atmosphere that seeps here and there to give us back a sense of community and humanity, rarely found in contemporary records: spontaneous claps, improvised but "real" choruses, not perfect but "warm" solos, coughs, laughter, and above all the tremulous and delicately unsettling voice of Devendra weaving gently into the heart of the listener that give us an image of a Banhart Circus incredibly alive and joyful. A Circus that has the flavor of other times, unspecified places that belong to historical and political movements of over 50 years ago, with a romantic, decadent, utopian, and sunny aftertaste hardly found in other contemporary movements.
And here lies the "simple beauty" of this exciting and entertaining record by this American sprite and his band of irreverent freaks (the wonderful and fitting cover in honor of Sgt. Pepper is a gem!)

Devendra, after the excellent "Rejoicing in the Hands" and the following "El Nino Rojo", with this fine work has once again chosen to give his all to his audience, sparing not even a comma of his potential, without calculations or cold operations at the table (With the material of Cripple Crow some other "artist" might have had enough elements to make at least three CDs). We can only be grateful for this sincere demonstration of intellectual honesty and wish the likable long-haired guy to continue delighting us with "cathartic" and illuminating records like this one. In the meantime, someone suggests how to remove this CD from my player...