Devendra Banhart
Cripple Crow

THE REVIEW

There exists a family of poets, visionaries, and unruly souls who have spanned human history with their generations, perhaps from the beginning of time. Sometimes they sing, sometimes they write, other times they paint, but they might also be content to sow messages in the furrows of the earth, wandering silently. The painters Van Gogh and Ligabue, the poet Dino Campana, the musician Syd Barrett, have been members of this brilliant and nonconformist, hallucinatory and sweet, dangerous yet harmless family.
Devendra Banhart is one of them. He asks for no labels, doesn't even dream of them. He throws handfuls upon handfuls of songs onto the carpet, savoring them and turning them into records.

The problem is that labels, unfortunately, stick to you without having been requested.
I would love to know which superb music critic came up with the idea of baptizing the very particular style of Devendra Banhart with the name "Pre-War-Folk." And the remarkable thing is that the same journalists who coined the term, a couple of years ago, are now declaring the end of that genre. It's all nonsense. Just as "Pre-War-Folk" never really existed, neither should certain journalists. But why struggle to define, catalog, enclose, delineate, isolate, circumscribe a way of making music, only to toss the produced label into the trash? It is not the singer who marks the time, especially if he's twenty-three years old, but rather the critic who behaves like an accountant. And so we accept this new "Cripple Crow" as a gift, as an act of faith played with the desire to play, as a living and vibrant fresco painted on a wall made of clouds, as a declaration of love consumed by candlelight.

In this new production of Our Man, there is a sense of community, but also solitude, there is confession, but also deceit, there is purity, but also suspicion.
Many moods are traversed throughout the listening experience, and many timbres scattered. In every note, above all, dominate the love for the craft of the minstrel and a sense of abundant inspiration.
How many songs move within the soul of Devendra Banhart?
What melodies yet to be discovered run through his veins?
Listen to this album in the only possible way—by forgetting yourselves, giving in to the suggestions, and feeling free to get bored when a piece lasts too long or to be amazed when the magic calls you. "Cripple Crow" is not a perfect work and does not aspire to be; it does not ask to represent the beginning, continuation, or end of a stylistic adventure. "Cripple Crow", simply, demands nothing: it allows itself to be caught like a flower in a world covered by thorns.