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Under The RadarIt's easy to lay the rap on Banhart's drifting towards the middle of the road with the fuller, whole-band sound he's embraced, or the bigger labels or the greater notoriety, but the fault clearly lies with Banhart himself, who has become a lot easier to understand. [Fall 2009, p.56]
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What Will We Be stands as a fittingly ambiguous, partly frustrating and altogether fascinating response to that question. Call it artful artlessness, or vice versa.
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It’s not surprising that What Will We Be sounds, then, like a relaxed, slightly crisper take on the ideas that informed his previous release. This haze of lazy Tropicalia, occasionally interrupted by an indulged moment of proggy vamp, isn’t necessarily a compromise.
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Through supplementation and wider instrumentation, he's traded in quiet haunting oddness for drowsy tranquil oddness, an exchange that may at some time pay better dividends than it does here.
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More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.
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Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.
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One can't escape the feeling that, for a writer and performer of Banhart's undoubted talents, this album sees him rather treading water, and failing to match the originality of his persona with correspondingly original or engaging material.
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MojoFor every throughly relised composition, there is a meandering fragment, great only as far as it goes. [Nov 2009, p.90]
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There’s some interest to be found but for the most part he displays a real lack of daring.
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Alternative PressTellingly, 'Angelika' and 'Maria Leonza' only get comfortably loose and silly when halfway finished. With a Strokes-y guitar part and a driving backbeat, the innovative '16th & Valencia, Roxy Music' is hopefully what Banhart will be in the future. [Dec 2009, p.108]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 15
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Mixed: 3 out of 15
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Negative: 1 out of 15
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Apr 2, 2011
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Jan 19, 2021
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Apr 14, 2013