Devendra Banhart - Flying Wig

Released: 22/09/23

Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was constantly listening to The Grateful Dead somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Eno-esque. Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a precious friendship with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon ” a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart's 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon's 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that) and home-made tattoos ” but never previously translated into the recording studio. It's about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise, - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape ” culminating in a record that sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit¦ if I'm going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.