Devendra Banhart: braving eternity

Where can you find heaven? Up there or down in your heart? By locking onto a soul or a winning Lotto ticket? But then, it occasionally can be found in very simple things like - a guitar and a voice. Devendra Banhart’s voiced songs, preferably. Promoting his album ‘Rejoicing in the Hands of the Golden Empress’, Devendra can’t refrain from creativity even on his birthday.

Beginning the show solo - later on he is accompanied by two more guitarists - it furnishes an instant wealth of songwriting goodies. Via an amalgam of sounds that demonstrates an incredible capacity for twists and spectral vocalisation: it is bone-chilling, remarkable, amazing. His gaze hovers above our heads and fixes itself on some distant past, morphed into the present and transported into… time-free zone. Banhart is not aware of restraints, the book of life is open on every page.

Suffering fever and [previous] night’s Spanish debauchery, Devendra sounds all the more… well - authentic. His voice echoes with extra history and age, like it has had hundred of lives behind… And, as if he’d been recorded in the earliest days of gramophones despite looking as if he just walked out of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ hip-period.

This New Yorker speaks languages that transcend time. This is 1920s blues going on Bob Dylan, folk going native… The second guitarist even brings a bit of country flavour to tonight‘s repertoire. Banhart also honours some of his roots by covering Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot and Johnny Thunders’ tracks. And yet, this is troubadour on a mission.

Not many an artist have made a critic think of Woody Guthrie lately… Perhaps not so much hobo-ing songs but equally poignant episodes of urban decay, loss and emo-slavery… This is minimal, stripped down performance that feels like sonic meditations; the general impression is a lonesome player on a porch somewhere deep South in an attempt to come to terms with everything through music. The rest of us are just passers by, caught in the moment, perhaps intruding on the catharsis in the process…

The amazing thing is that this set never sounds downbeat. Alas, with very few remarks between songs, he’s gone within 50 minutes. The encore was an astonishing tambourine and voice union that sent us out feeling - primeval. Brave and unique in the homogenic world, Banhart act like no-one is (t)here. Sometimes it even appears he’s surprised by the applause.

As groundbreaking as Norah Jones’s bittersweet commercial pill was to swallow. This man is a Gulliver in the Lego-land! Happy Birthday and thank you for the ‘party’, mistah.