For over two decades Devendra Banhart has been collaborating with multi-instrumentalist Noah Georgeson, who in turn ended up producing most of his albums. But on their newest project, both musicians wrote and recorded their parts separately at the height of the pandemic before combining them into a single product. This earned Georgeson top billing, but more importantly resulted in the icy, ambiance that permeates the record and the circumstances of its design. Maybe it’s the added instrumentation from guests like harpist Mary Lattimore or maybe it’s the result of two people on an inevitably similar wavelength, but Refuge sounds like the work of a singular artist, if not just a singular vision.
It’s also here that Banhart may finally escape the freak-folk tag that’s bound him to the eclecticism that’s permeated his entire career. Even his most accomplished albums were bogged down by tracks that demanded his loose, playful side, forcing Banhart to be taken less seriously than he should have and leaving much of his work artistically bloated. Banhart never seemed to mind much though, releasing his albums every couple of years with the help of Georgeson and defining each one with his unique character. Banhart in reality, of course, is less typified by freak-folk than many who found themselves pulled in by the nascent genre in the early aughts.
Instead, Banhart is a pop singer, with a knack for melody that makes even some of his most insufferable tracks exciting. This melodic sense has always earned Banhart a consistent following, but it’s perhaps most integral to the success of Refuge.
Paraphrasing the oft-quoted Brian Eno, great ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting, and basically, the Terry Riley adjacent Georgeson keeps it ignorable while Banhart brings in the melody. The result leaves the listener the way the best ambient music does, comforted, beguiled, and refreshed, and when the disembodied voice finally chimes in on “Sky Burial” it’s just enough to pull the listener in for the final stretch.
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You should check the liner notes! I assumed that Devendra wrote the more melodic ones too, but when I looked at the credits, it was the opposite. Georgeson wrote all of the more melodic ones with acoustic instruments, and Devendra wrote the more synthy ambient ones (which are more my jam).