Devendra Banhart - Flying Wig (2023) [Hi-Res]

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 11th 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."