- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Banhart's persona emerges intact despite the mainstream sound, however, and What Will We Be becomes a pleasantly fresh album to follow the ponderous, sprawling "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon."
-
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]
-
This time the quintet holed up for two months in a Northern California cabin, and the resulting collection from the idiosyncratic singer/songwriter is intimate, experimental, and ultimately accessible.
-
There’s some interest to be found but for the most part he displays a real lack of daring.
-
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.
-
Entertainment WeeklyMaybe he's listening a little too closely to his spirit animal, but either way, the guy sure sounds inspired. [30 Oct 2009, p.58]
-
A basement-made bundle of hypnotic unpredictability, this one looks to be a grower.
-
He filches from a variety of genres--Brazilian Tropicalia, glam rock, lounge jazz, Zeppelin-like psychedelia--but it never sounds awkward. He loosens the stitches on each to fashion his own unique costume.
-
MojoFor every throughly relised composition, there is a meandering fragment, great only as far as it goes. [Nov 2009, p.90]
-
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.
-
Butler’s done well to harness the fuller ideas first explored on "Smokey" but, in doing so, has sacrified raw Devendra for something just a bit too, well, Bees-y.
-
Some will be sad to find that his pulsating vocals and wacky storytelling have subsided, and that his vague lyrics have grown simpler. But anyone who’s avoided Banhart’s hippy-busker tunes now have a reason to give him a chance.
-
What once made Banhart such a strange bird--roaming from jazz to folk to indie pop, often within a single song, as on the impossibly catchy 'Chin Chin & Muck Muck'--now seems almost mainstream, as if the rest of the pop world has not only caught up with him, but left him in its dust.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Banhart clearly gets bogged down in that freedom, as the amount of sheer hokiness on some of his albums can attest to. But with What Will We Be, Banhart gets back to earning that right for total creative freedom.
-
Q MagazineMark this down as the point which we can say with certainty for the first time Devendra Banhart is here for the long run. [Nov 2009, p.113]
-
The sixth studio album by Devendra Banhart is the best he's ever made. What Will We Be is also great enough in patchouli-scented spurts to suggest that the 28-year-old singer-songwriter's defining classic is one more record and a little more focus away.
-
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.
-
A big improvement over 2007's ho-hum "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon," it's also the most consistently satisfying full-length he's made.
-
On this, his major-label bow, the (now beardless!) prince of freak-folk has harnessed his many left-field tics and energies to craft his most elegantly driven work yet.
-
Even when Banhart seems more in a predicament than in the zone, he’s hopelessly inventive. Several songs experience complete transformations over their modest three-minute spans, succeeding like little daybreaks.
-
What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.
-
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.
-
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]
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 11 out of 15
-
Mixed: 3 out of 15
-
Negative: 1 out of 15
-
Apr 2, 2011
-
Jan 19, 2021
-
Apr 14, 2013