DEVENDRA BANHART

American/Venezuelan freak-folk musician goes electronic. Best known for skewed, impish, early Bolanesque folk rock, Devendra Banhart treads pastures-new on his 11th album. Recorded in a cabin in California’s Topanga Canyon once owned by Neil Young, Flying Wig dispenses with acoustic guitars, utilising synths, vintage beat-boxes and seismic, heavily processed electric guitars instead. It’s an approach that works beautifully on hazy dream pop stand-out Fireflies, but these dense, largely downtempo songs just occasionally get stodgy, indistinct. Banhart’s co-producer here is Welsh singer-songwriter and labelmate Cate Le Bon. Together, they sidestep convention on Twin, which pitches itself somewhere between David Bowie’s Fashion and Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Pt 2. Drawing inspiration from a hope-in-the-face-of-adversity poem by Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa, Banhart approached Flying Wig “battle-scarred by life and loss”,…