Devendra Banhart
What Will We Be
(Reprise, 2009)

“You show me a sunset overflowing / But who cares where it’s going?” With that snappy two-liner at the end of “Baby”, the jump-off single from Devendra Banhart’s new LP What Will We Be, the former maestro of the freak-folk movement embraces his newest outlet, the unabashed love song, with a dismissive wave of the hand for any context that may have preceded him. He seems to wonder why we might care.

We care where you’re going, Devendra, because we care where you’ve been. We cared about the mostly acoustic, weirdo home recordings you made your name with in this decade’s earlier stretch, and our ears, already scrambled a bit from 2007’s diverse Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, wondered what curiosities awaited them when they heard the follow-up, which would be your major label debut for Warner Brothers’ Reprise label.

These are not the acoustic strum and sometimes horn-baked sing-alongs of Niño Rojo (see “We All Know”), nor even the studio-polished but still lyrically left-field musings of Cripple Crow (see “Chinese Children”). While no one would confidently claim the 14 cuts on Banhart’s sixth full-length aren’t odd, part of what makes these songs unexpected is that they are earnest exercises in well-established genres.

Singing atop standard rock instrumentation on “Baby”, Banhart lets only the occasional queer sentiment rear its head, recasting what was once his bread and butter as an intermittently stuck-out lyrical sore thumb—love is compared to some everlasting onion and a bow-tied kangaroo—amidst smiling assertions that nothing else matters as long as you’re next to him.

Mid-album track “Rats”, which kicks off with a slow-groove bass line, is a Zeppelin-inspired slab of guitar-rock, and a consequently interesting place for Banhart’s trademark warble to float above. “Mama, ain’t it grand,” he inquires, “that I get to be the fool again?” “Foolin’” is actually the title of the closing cut, a half-reggae pleasantry where the 28 year old finds himself approaching humanity, one day at a time, his love of the world overflowing in tropical splendor. It’s shockingly unobjectionable.

Most of it is unobjectionable, in fact, and this may be a function of an interesting diversity among the songs presented. There are swarthy, Spanish lounge act left turns (“Angelika”), and even an of-the-moment dance-rock track (”16th & Valencia Roxy Music”) that some label exec probably tried to re-title and put forth as the single.

The obvious read on this, of course, is that American/Venezualan Banhart has always been both a contrarian and whimsical outsider, constantly repositioning himself against other’s expectations. As he gains mainstream success for approaching music-making from a singular perspective, he’s also misaligned himself from broader contemporary tastes and trends.

It seems as though Banhart has fully grasped the choice he’s made, knowing even that, while break-up albums hold a special place in the popular music canon, it’s a much finer feat to reassert the dominance of the love song. Contrarians being what they are, perhaps we should have expected nothing less.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]