Track Listing

1. Wake Up Little Sparrow
2. Ay Mama
3. We All Know
4. Little Yellow Spider
5. A Ribbon
6. At The Hop
7. My Ships
8. Noah
9. Sister
10. Water May Walk
11. Horseheadedfleshwizard
12. An Island
13. Be Kind
14. Owl Eyes
15. The Good Red Road
16. Electric Heart

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28720 in Music
• Released on: 2004-09-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced

Amazon.co.uk Review
More a companion piece than a fresh LP in its own right, Nino Rojo compiles the studio out-takes from Devendra Banhart's 'proper' 2004 album, Rejoicing in the Hands. But far from revealing this San Franciscan faerie-folk finger-picker as a talent stretching himself too thin, it offers some very real evidence that Banhart's muse is at the very least, eerily deep, and at the most, potentially bottomless. And really, why not? That high, quavering voice would sound good reciting a shopping list, and his guitar-playing – deft in complexity, fingers audibly scraping from fret to fret – seems to be limitless in its capacity to discover strange, creepy-pretty melodies. As before, Banhart doesn't always present his songs totally neat: "Ay Mama" gains a gentle power from quiet yawns of background brass, while "We All Know" and "Be Kind" are as close as he gets to full-band tracks, bolstered by slapped tambourines and reedy harmonica. The finest song here, though, is "Little Yellow Spider", a quaint nursery-rhyme with a barb in its tail: "Hey there little sexy pig, you made it with a man/ And now you've got a little kid with hooves instead of hands". Magic, as is the Banhart way. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

Eerily beautiful folk music with a modern twist
The modern twist is maybe half in the actual sound which goes for a kind of intentional dissonance, almost to grab your attention (which it does) and the other half is in the lyrics which seem very much up to date but at the same time you can imagine many of the themes being timeless. It certainly has a retro feel. I can imagine hippies in the 70's aspiring to sound like this but not quite being able to do it since all the music of the time was so different than now.

Little Yellow Spider & At the Hop will be known to many British people since they have been included in recent television commercials - 'little white monkey staring at the sand...' Yep - thats Devendra Banhart.

A lovely little album to mellow yourself out on a summer afternoon.

Silly person [...]
[...] how to have fun, how to escape, remember childhood and visualise anything that is not REAL!!! This album is not, on the whole a collection of his best work but it still touches on genius and easily deserves 5 stars. If you haven't discovered Devendra's work yet i would recommend Cripple Crow as a first album, to get tuned into his sound, lyrics and mad world, as it's a little less querky sounding, then i'm sure you'll get quite addicted.

i hate Devendra Banhart
Crap album. every time i hear this man's music i feel true hate. his stupid music is on a phone advert at the moment with young trendies larking about all over town, which says it all really. ironic 'arn't i weird' kookiness is singularly contemptible and mr Banhart is the epitome of it. he gives his influences from the 60s/70s folk scene a bad name, and manages to conform to all the F Zappa hippie stereotypes that they weren't.
a curse on him, and may all his silly fans feel Very Stupid when the Truth is known to ALL!!!