I hadn’t heard a lot from him for a long time, but according to Pitchfork and other media, freak-folksy artist Devendra Banhart will be releasing a new album this year. We can already listen to one song off ‘Mala’, which will be released on March 12th via Nonesuch Records, and this doesn’t sound at all like anything I remember about him, but I must admit he had lost me a little bit after his 2005 album ‘Cripple Crow’.
‘Für Hildegard von Bingen’ is a weird thing, pulsating and going crescendo, hypnotic and almost dance-y, with hushed distant vocals and a 80s synth vibe,.. but the whole thing is neither unclassifiable nor groundbreaking. However, the title is much more intriguing than the music, just picture this: Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th century German Catholic saint, who was also a writer and composer and philosopher! I wonder how Banhart got into this mystic character, but this is what happens when you have a wild imagination:
‘In my head there was this little movie, an alternative universe', declared Banhard, 'I guess– Hildegard is sequestered in her cloister, and one day she gets a VHS cassette and it's the prime era of the MTV VJ, and she just goes wild. 'That’s it for me,' she says. 'That's how I'm going to get my message across.' So she escapes the cloister…and becomes a VJ.’
Okay! I am not sure it would be approved by the Pope, but who cares? For this new album, he got to work with guitarist and long-time bandmember Noah Georgeson, Beck’s bassist Bram Inscore, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s guitarist Josiah Steinbrick and recorded the album at his former Los Angeles home studio,… what? Banhart left LA for New York City? When did this happen? So gone my chances to see him walking him by the Echo during a secret Beck's gig,… it happened, it happened! Anyway, as usual, Banhart created the cover art for ‘Mala’, which, looking at the tracklist, promises to be as multicultural and original as the Venezuelan-American songwriter.
Tracklist for Mala:
01 Golden Girls
02 Daniel
03 Für Hildegard von Bingen
04 Never Seen Such Good Things
05 Mi Negrita
06 Your Fine Petting Duck
07 The Ballad of Keenan Milton
08 A Gain
09 Won't You Come Over?
10 Cristobal
11 Hatchet Wound
12 Mala
13 Won't You Come Home
14 Taurobolium