Devendra Banhart & The Grogs / Pikelet

Devendra Banhart – Metro Theatre, 24 January 2010

The floors of the Metro were sparsely populated for Melbourne's Pikelet, but she made the most of her time with some intriguing guitar and gadget wonky pop.
The crowd swelled immensely in time for the Texan headliner, who had bought along his backing band The Grogs for his first visit to our shores since 2004. Banhart bounded out with a grin and graciously individually introduced the band as his first order of business before they got things going with ‘Long Haired Child’. There were extravagant arm movements and bad dancing aplenty contributing the whole ‘gosh darn’ pleasant vibe permeating through the room.
The band weren’t mere backing musicians, with the drummer giving an intro worthy of a TV evangelist “here’s Devendra coming at you with some words of love” for the jaunty ‘Baby’. An intimate solo bracket followed, of just Banhart with an acoustic, no fuss, low lights and it resulted in big cheers. Banhart’s between song banter ranged from the almost sermon-like ‘I take everything as a sign from God’ to rants against smokers, to observations on Eddy Murphy’s Raw to reminiscing about things that took place at “an intersection in San Francisco”.
So while you have this uniquely entertaining and endearing individual - who everyone had been waiting years to see and with people hanging of his every word - he was diluted somewhat by his egalitarian belief in sharing the spotlight with his bandmates. Everyone got a turn singing, songs gave way to jams, and we even got “a reggae song played by white people”. While the set was enjoyable enough, it all just got a bit ‘holiday resort’ in its tone, which for a big room of folks on a simmering summer night probably isn’t such a bad thing, really. But I was left to ponder how good a smaller venue, solo scenario would have been to showcase this idiosyncratic individual, though I ‘spose he at least got shirtless for the encore, if you are into that sort of thing.