At age 24, Devendra Banhart has emerged as a leader of the new new-folk movement, a tyrannically whimsical subgenre with adherents who favor sweet, slightly unfocused songs about nature or the human condition, often sung to modified four-tracks in sunny, high voices. A gentle, scattered, extravagantly eccentric combination of Donovan, Tiny Tim and Jeff Buckley, Banhart’s latest is both sweet and confounding: It will make you want to either throttle him or take him home.
Cripple Crow, Banhart’s fourth studio album in three years, finds the singer in his natural habitat, surrounded by sitars, violins, and, mostly, gently plucked guitars. Only nominally more polished than his past releases, it’s fractured and childlike. Songs start promisingly and then peter out somewhere around the one-minute mark; others (like the brief rumination “Dragonflies”) don’t even make it that far. (Banhart may have Tiny Tim’s voice, but he has Ryan Adams’ attention span).
Cripple Crow feels more momentous than it actually is. There are Spanish-language tracks (Banhart is part Venezuelan), denatured waltzes, echoes of Tin Pan Alley and psychedelic pop, and lots of strummy, late ’60s-style folk. Banhart doesn’t perform these songs so much as eke them out; as a result, Cripple Crow has all of the charms and frustrations that only an aggressively minimalist 22-song folk album can have.
The disc is chock-full of Banhart’s usual preoccupations: love and butterflies, children and clouds. Kids are fetishized throughout, on the great “Chinese Children” and especially on the disc’s strangest track, the clammy “Little Boys” (“I still see so many little boys I want to marry/I see plenty little kids I have yet to have”).
On “I Feel Just Like A Child”, one of the disc’s few departures from twee, Banhart pretty much sums things up (“They think I know shit/But that’s just it/I’m a child”), though by that point it can’t help but feel like an excuse. An embrace of everything naïf is pretty much standard issue for freak-folkies like Banhart, but the more straightforward his gaze, the better Cripple Crow winds up being.
Banhart is an impressive imagist and a great crooner, and more slyly humorous than he’s often given credit for, though he’s capable of turning an amazing phrase and then not saying much of anything for the next fifteen minutes. The album’s best track, “Queen Bee”, is a love song of delicate economy (“She’s kissed everyone I’ve kissed/She’s missed everyone I’ve missed/Her guess/Is always as good as mine”) that he never manages to top.
His weedy, warbly voice, pushed to the highest end of its register and beyond, begins to wear after a while, and his miniaturized compositions often struggle to say something — there are repeated references to the war, for one thing — though it’s not always clear what.
Cripple Crow feels intentionally makeshift, the work of someone trying hard to sound like they’re not trying hard. It’s a shaggy dog of an album, a strange and intermittently compelling mix of ambition and indifference.
