Devendra Banhart – “Flying Wig” (Released 22nd September 2023)

Description

//Mexican Summer//

£24.99 – 1xLP, Limited Edition Indies Exclusive Blue Coloured Vinyl

£21.99 – 1xLP, Standard Edition Vinyl

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.”

Tracklisting:

Side A
1. Feeling
2. Fireflies
3. Nun
4. Sight Seer 5. Sirens

Side B
1. Charger
2. Flying Wig
3. Twin
4. May
5. The Party