Search - Devendra Banhart :: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

Fans of old Devendra should give it a shot

S. Jacobsen | Maryland | 08/21/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I have really enjoyed Devendra's music for a while now. I am a big fan of Nino Rojo and Rejoicing in the Hands, and I really like a lot of "Oh me Oh My". I have not yet listened to Cripple Crow, but like the few songs I have heard off it.



I first heard the song "Cristobal" off of this release on KEXP radio in Seattle. I loved it. I then found out that his new cd was coming out soon, and I was really excited. I purchased it and honestly I was largely disappointed upon first listen. There were definitely songs and elements that I liked, but I thought it was overall a very poor change from his older stuff. I really liked his minimalistic, acoustic, folky weirdness that he gave us. A lot of what made his music so appealing to me seemed to be missing from this album. I would have given it two stars when I first heard it, mostly because I was shocked that it was so dramatically different that the Devendra Banhart that I was use to. Over a series of a few months I played the album a few more times and each time it grew on me more and more. Now, I enjoy it just as much as Nino Rojo and Rejoicing in the Hands. It is very different, but a good different.



In short, if you like Devendra's older works and don't find this cd particularly appealing, give it another shot. If you are new to Devendra, you may enjoy it immensely for what it is. It just took me a while to adjust to Devendra's new direction. The musical arrangements are more developed and complex. He still infuses the music with his wonderfully strange, almost psychedelic influences. I look forward to Devendra's new release this October.



Favorite tracks:

Sea Horse

Cristobal

Samba Vexillographica

"

Musical pomo

Katya Cohen | Clemson, SC United States | 02/01/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The advantage of working with younger generations is that they can turn you onto things you would not otherwise seek on your own. Such is the case with the music of Devendra Banhart: one of my students used to play a medley that, to my delight, included "Chinese Children" in class, and another sent me a couple of his CD's recently (Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon). I slipped them (one at a time) into the CD player and took to them immediately. My husband, on the other hand, upon hearing Cripple Crow in the car, called it "derivative boring crap".



I know what it is that I like about these records; it's comfortable music. It shape shifts among a myriad of familiar genres that make up my musical consciousness and that, for the most part, I like: the receptors in my brain are already configured to respond to it. The following is a partial list of ingredients others have invoked to describe Banhart's music: Funk, Samba, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, Tropicalia, Reggae, Beatles, Tiny Tim, Caetano Veloso, David Crosby, Donovan, Santana, Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Byrds, Conga, Groove, bossa nova, psychedelia, folk, and I definitely hear The Doors... One of the favorable reviews of "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" on Amazon does say the CD "has something for everyone" with the assumption that that's a good thing. It obviously does nothing for my husband who likes a more assertive kind of music; and although I love listening to the albums, one of my favorite unfavorable reviews of Cripple Crow is: Este CD e espantosamente horrible... no tiene estilo proprio. I love the word "espantosamente" (scary); but it is the phrase "no tiene estilo proprio" (has no personal style)that interests me, and brings me back to Jean Baudrillard and the `80's.



Although I first learned about the word "bricolage" from my French uncle while he tinkered around the construction site that was to be his future house, if I recall correctly, it went from fun to theory with Derrida[1], and was quite in vogue during the 80's to describe what visual artists and writers were doing with their art and texts---or was everything just "text" then (?)... Baudrillard does not seem to use the word to describe the state of the arts in the 80's; but what he describes as being postmodern in his interview "Game with Vestiges" seems to fit under its definition (gestalt being what it is, of course it would). "Art can no longer operate as radical critique or deconstructive metaphor. So art at the moment is adrift in a kind of weightlessness. It has brought about a sphere where all forms can coexist. One can play in all possible ways, but no longer against each other. It amounts to this: art is losing its specificity. ...It is becoming mosaic... it cannot do anything more than operate out of a combinatory mode..... The postmodern is characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible... It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has deconstructed its entire universe; so all that's left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces." Visual Art seems to have internalized and gotten past this; but could this be what Banhart is doing consciously or not?



By the 80's Baudriallard could sound melodramatic and nostalgic, and he seems to imply a sadness to this postmodern form of play: "Postmodernism tries to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive...". And although I see Banhart's music as quintessentially postmodern[2] and thus utterly digestible, I don't see it as a "reconstruction in sadness" but one that is done in "joy"; it remains to be seen where he can take it from here.



[1] Well it was first used by Claude Levi Strauss (if the memories of Anthro 101 serve me well); but it r-e-a-l-l-y got s-e-r-i-o-u-s after Derrida got adopted by the visual arts critical establishment. ...and then it disappeared...



[2] weightless, combinatory, and "bricolaged"

"

I shouldn't like this, but I do

TheRobert | Portland, Oregon | 09/24/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I'm not into 70's rock at all, and I'm not really into the folk scene either, but something about this album is really appealing. I picked it up for two bucks at a local record store because I had heard of the guy, but wasn't very familiar with his music, and have to say I'm very pleasantly surprised. I especially like the songs in Spanish. Great music for a sunny summer afternoon - of which we have few here in the Northwest."