Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 19/09/05
Label: XL

There's something increasingly divine about Devendra Banhart. He looks like Jesus as interpreted by Cecil B De Mille. You risk hellfire by badmouthing him. He surrounds himself with like-minded, ethereal, moongazing disciples such as Joanna Newsom, CocoRosie, Antony (as in the Johnsons) and the whooping stoners often heard in the background here. He's even taken to suffering the little children: viz the endless references here to the marvel that is birth, babies and children.

This is not a good thing - if you can part the seas you should certainly have no trouble asserting your authority over desk-bound penpushers who think 22 tracks (plus a hidden song) is a little excessive. And so it came to pass that "Cripple Crow" - Banhart's fourth album in two years, and the first to be almost entirely with a full band - while lasting no longer than the average album (74 minutes to be precise), feels longer than a cricket test. The reason is its patchiness.

Several tracks are simply brilliant. Hushed, circular opener "Now That I Know" is a sacred treat and the Bo Diddleyesque "I Feel Just Like A Child" ("I need you to sit me on your lap/And I need you to make me take my nap") a solid gold, thump-the-table, fully-formed humdinger. On the handful of heartbreakingly tender Spanish language ballads - "Santa Maria Da Feira", "Quadateluna", "Inaniel", "Luna De Margarita" - Banhart sounds like he's actually exercising his heart rather than the part of the brain that regulates whimsy.

But there is far too much irritating hippywaffle amongst these gems. The blink-and-you'll-miss-it "The Beatles" is typical of Banhart's refusal to either persevere with, or scrap, experiments that don't work out. It begins interestingly, lamenting the death of half of the Fab Four, before morphing into Hispanic gibberish. "When They Come" is a lazy, beardy-weirdy, anti-war jam boasting the impossibly flower child lyric delivered without a trace of self-consciousness: "We've got no gu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uns/ No we don't have any weapons/Just our cornmeal and our children". "Hey Mama Wolf" drifts along as well-meaningly yet aimlessly as a shoeless raver at dawn.

Delivered in the Texas-born, Venezuela-raised hobo's distinctive warble, it's all wrapped in a big, pongy sheepskin coat of 60s influences from Marc Bolan at his trippiest, early Velvet Underground and trad English folk to "Hair". Clearly he has some way to go before hitting his stride. Expect another half dozen scriptures before the decade's out.

    by Anna Britten