Style
Banhart's music is often associated with the New Weird America genre, along with Vetiver and Joanna Newsom. The New York Times has called his songs "free associative work" and SPIN magazine has written that "Banhart's albums offer ashram-appropriate guitar strums, trippy-hippie tone poetry." Various publications have described his style as psych folk, avant-folk, freak folk, Lo-Fi, hipster folk revival, and alternative folk.
Some reviewers, including AllMusic, The Times, and Mojo, have pointed out similarities between Banhart's songs and production with that of the early 1970's band Tyrannosaurus Rex (an early version of Mark Bolan's T. Rex). In a May 2004 interview with Arthur magazine, Banhart stated that he was unaware of the music of Tyrannosaurus Rex until after he began writing and recording songs. Devendra Banhart instead prefers to credit Vashti Bunyan, Caetano Veloso, Simon Diaz and Arthur Russell among his main influences.
Read more about this topic: Devendra Banhart
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)