Devendra Banhart – Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
This is more like it. While 2005’s Cripple Crow was cluttered with cameos and was unabashedly indulgent, even by freak-folk standards, Devendra Banhart’s new disc not only coheres, it comes across as a thoroughly envisioned and executed work, maybe even a classic.
The cohesion is due in part to the fact that Banhart made the record with his touring band, a tightly knit group, but likely also is due to the sense of place the album conveys. Written and recorded at a house in the Santa Monica Mountains just north of Los Angeles, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon has the relaxed, homey vibe of musicians woodshedding in some out-of-the-way place — a west coast version, say, of Dylan and the Band in the Catskills.
The album alternates mainly between crepuscular, Latin-tinged exercises in woolgathering such as “Cristobal” and “Seaside”, and stately rock anthems such as “Tonada Yanomaminista” and the eight-minute, multi-part “Seahorse”. Both of the latter are worthy of Arthur Lee and Love circa Da Capo, while the whimsical exotica of “So Long Old Bean” and “Shabop Shalom” nods in the direction of Van Dyke Parks. Even the over-the-top gospel of “Saved” works here, its self-deprecating good humor a respite from Banhart’s sometimes cloying stabs at significance.
Strings augment the creaky psychedelia in spots, fleshing out the innate melodicism of Banhart’s compositions even as the record’s electric textures — not just guitars, but an assortment of keyboards — lend ballast to a sound that in the past has been so slight as to be insubstantial.