Devendra Banhart - ‘Cripple Crow’ (XL Recordings) Released 19/09/05

Like the first rays of the sun through acid-tinted eyes, the new Devendra Banhart album comes in a spectrum of psychedelic colours, borrowing every significant hippie style and plastering it to a canvas of strange folky tales.

Right, that’s enough of the new-age stereotyping; what Banhart has produced here is a stunning tapestry of eclectic yet unified songs. He has adopted a wider range of sounds this time around, reaching out to, amongst others, fried acid-rock, mariachi ballads and the bluesy stomp of new single ‘I Feel Just Like A Child’. The reason Banhart can get away with such wide-reaching thievery is that he shoots everything through with a distinctly spaced-out sense of humour. It’s not that he’s trying to be funny, but the weird spirit voices that inhabit half of the tracks on offer don’t make you think that it’s all a very straight-faced affair.

Tracks like ‘The Beatles’ (guess who that’s about?) have too much of a ‘Yellow Submarine’ attitude to be taken seriously, and Banhart manages to convince us that he’s done it deliberately. It’s this humour that manages to hold together the wild ethnic whoring that is going on all over this album. One minute it’s all somber folk on ‘Inaniel’, where poor Devendra sounds like he’s had one too many comedowns, and then the next it’s ‘Hey Mama Wolf’ with it’s cheery refrain that sounds a lot like Jeff Buckley. In fact, the ghost of Buckley, along with Nick Drake and other folk anomalies, haunts Devendra’s voice and his music.

The great thing about this album is that it works no matter what mood you are in. The chaotic way in which styles are thrown around in 75 minutes contrasts with their oh-so-soft delivery, so there’s also something to enjoy. If you like beardy 60’s rejects singing in croaky voices about butterflies and such.