Album Review: Ma by Devendra Banhart

Mother Earth, mother land, and our maternal relationships—freak folkster Devendra Banhart returns with Ma deftly weaving through these various matrilineal permutations to reflect on current ills, with songs so effortless and pretty, they sooth and comfort. He sings three songs in his mother tongue, Spanish, out of helplessness, and to probably stand in solidarity with family in Venezuela, experiencing a humanitarian crisis. Banhart grew up in Caracas with his mother and stepfather.

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At the start of the century, Devendra Banhart emerged as the ecstatic pied piper of an esoteric folk resurgence, a magnetic singer-songwriter who mingled childlike wonder and guru-level insight over glittering fingerpicked guitar. Unapologetically inquisitive and ardent, Banhart's early works seemed to provide a sort of instruction manual for life. But Banhart soon seemed lost himself, or at least distracted in the search for something more.

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"Is this nice? Do you like it?" asks Devendra Banhart in the opening line on his tenth musical offering to the universe, Ma. Perhaps it asks that question too soon, tout de suite, before one even has an opinion or a chance to know how to feel. But this record is just that: nice.   There isn't quite as much spice, colour or flash as seasoned listeners of his may be accustomed to, but it's nice. And as the word's definition goes, this record is pleasant, agreeable and satisfactory. If you were to imagine each record of Banhart's as a pillow ….

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When Devendra Banhart appeared in the early 2000s as a wooly, free-spirited troubadour, his weird and tender acoustic songs recorded on answering machine cassettes placed him perfectly in the wilderness of the freak folk movement emerging at that time. When Banhart's recording budgets caught up with his muse, the eclecticism that had been obscured by his stripped-down arrangements came to the forefront. With the demented doo wop and classic rock celebrations of 2005's Cripple Crow, Banhart shed the one-dimensionality of his earlier albums, embracing a genre-fluid style that he'd revisit at times throughout the rest of his discography.

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Reuniting with long-term affiliate Noah Georgeson, this tenth album in a seventeen-year recording career finds Banhart tacitly resurrecting the electronic elasticity of Mala, interweaving ricocheting reverb with brooding, often spare, acoustic sparkle. Forgoing the wandering impulse of predecessor Ape In Pink Marble, the Houstonian singer-songwriter summons a diverse sonic patchwork on Ma; a sequence of concise three-minute numbers that individually inhabit their own private universe; autonomous tracks stringed together in a disparate mesh, avoiding an overriding need to cohere. The latter doesn't equate necessarily with weakness, despite manifesting in a somewhat predictable template, adhered to with a perfunctory sense of rhythm; an attribute that arguably recurs throughout Banhart's canon of material.

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