BY WILLIAM LENNON
When your breakout album is called Cripple Crow, it seems unlikely you’ll venture too far from your trademark Brooklyn-by-way-of-San-Francisco urban/rustic aesthetic. But the more you listen to Devendra Banhart, the more his music — which sounds sleepy at first — starts to lure you into a trippy trance. Yes, Banhart looks like a traveling songsmith as imagined by Delos Incorporated, a walkabout character in a theme park where you can sip snake oil lattes and read your horoscope by gaslight. But in addition to being a master of the heavy-lidded hipster ballad, he’s a connoisseur of genre. Each song is a half-lullaby/half-spell suspended in a rich, glittery haze, and Banhart’s tendency to waltz into salsa or klezmer or a Bollywood dance number injects his music with an unmistakably unique pop and crackle.
