Flying Wig: Opaque Blue Vinyl LP
MEX3510Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Mexican Summer
Release Date: 22nd September
Devendra's back with his idiosyncrantic folk pop but this time with an element of a glossy 80s sophistipop, like he's been mainlining Roxy Music's 'Avalon' with liquid fretless basslines and a sense of melodies floating off into the ether and hanging like clouds. Production handled by Cate Le Bon too, meaning there's so many interesting sounds and ideas going on here.
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.”