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Surprisingly, Devendra Banhart looks less like the hippy guru/folk hero he is often made out to be and is more 80’s metaller in appearance. Without his beard you get a good look at his pretty, impish face and along with his hip swivelling during those tropicalia numbers from ‘Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon,’ the effect is really quite hot. He delivers a stream of happy, jokey babble in-between songs and the atmosphere between audience and stage is friendly and warm. ‘Shabop Shalom’ makes the audience positively frisky. Despite this promising feeling of goodwill, the set is a strange beast- neither delicate nor powerful enough, tonight’s performance is underwhelming. When working the droney, wigged-out country songs the band fail to deliver anything that interesting and rather than absorb and hypnotise you as others such as Brightblack Morning Light or Mark Lanegan might, it just drags. A little self-indulgent, it’s reminiscent of The Doors on a particularly bad trip.
Perhaps in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere DB does a lot of Bee-bop vocals over 50’s milk shake parlour melodies from the new album, again it’s not strong enough to really keep your interest- young upstarts Vincent Vincent and the Villains are much more convincing in this area whereas DB just seems like he’s mucking about. From this we jump again to the Spanish songs and that hip-wiggle that is so alluring. Unfortunately the effect is that of Santana without the guitars - like a tacky Mexican themed restaurant, it lacks depth.
Despite this there are moments of rare beauty; the lost-sounding vocals are like Gregorian chant, echoey and soft - like those of My Morning Jacket. The shining guitars and dreamy washes of noise can sweep you away and ‘At the Hop’ tickles pleasantly along as always. In the main though, the delivery is a little disappointing - happily the contrived Marc Bolan-esque vocal stylings that plagued ‘Nino Rojo’ are no more but what is left behind is a curiously uninspiring Devendra Banhar t- record company indulgence may be to blame for the directionless jamming we see tonight. Someone needs to sit him down and make him think seriously about where he’s going with this stuff.
