Banhart conjures his demos and the cosmos

Following a disappointing Xiu Xiu show, my friends and I sauntered from the bar at Schuba's in Chicago to the stage to begrudgingly watch the following act. We met Devendra Banhart with good-natured shock. The shaggy, playful guy, who was a dead ringer for Cat Stevens, who played a Nick Drake-style of nylon sting picking and had tremendous control over his tenor with a powerful vibrato.\nThe Black Babies is a lo-fi mini-album that hardly does justice to Banhart's stage presence. The tape hiss and double tracking relegates his vocals to sounding shaky and makes his classical guitar sound like a steel string model. \nWhat doesn't get lost is Banhart's wit and beautiful guitar patterns, and eventually the poor recording becomes a rescuing factor for his music. Where he sounded vaudevillian on stage, on record he sounds like a demented backwoods character who drinks moonshine and writes perverted songs about the world inside his head. \nDrake's Tanworth-in-Arden home recordings is the particular homage, but Drake's mysticism was of a more human variety. Banhart (who sings on "Cosmos and Demos," "I've never told this story to another living soul/for fear it might awaken and the story would unfold") works out of a place that combines Dock Boggs with the Chronicles of Narnia.