Greg Is My Friend
Whilst in the middle of some unending tour, bearded songsmith Devendra Banhart and similarly-bearded bandmate Greg Rogove came up with a musical game for pre-show amusement: ten minutes before going on stage, they’d come up with a song-title, then force themselves to author the song based on it in that time. That on-the-road goof-off has become Megapuss, a band as utterly disposable as their back-story suggests.
Banhart has been heading this way for a while. After arriving as an unexpected, utterly alien talent liberally pillaging Marc Bolan’s early work as Tyrannosaurus Rex, the hairy sage has moved steadily away from his initial outsider/freak-folk brief. Cripple Crow’s meandering jams and blatant Beatles pastiches marked the moment when Banhart completely relinquished his initial mystical-troubadour shtick, but, by the dreadful 2006 novelty single “White Reggae Troll,” he'd become some mere musical jester, clowning through genres for comic effect.
Megapuss bears all the hallmarks of this. It’s ambling, lazy, shoddy; a grand musical prank that’s rarely as funny as it seems to believe itself to be. With names on its credits including Banhart and Strokes drummer/Little Joy frontman Fabrizio Moretti, there's enough musical credibility and straight-up celebrity to have an inbuilt audience in wait. But this Megapuss disc feels like an abuse of that goodwill.
Never Without Your Love
As an album, Surfing probably peaks with its first spin. There's something cute about the way they recycle the riff from “Hey, Bo Diddley,” transplant “Careless Whisper”’s cavalier solo from sultry sax onto wanky guitar, rhyme “intersection” with “yeast infection,” and dare themselves to author the songs to match lowbrow titles like “Chicken Titz.”
There’s even a handful of tracks that pass repeat-listen screenings: the title-track a piano/harp thrumming piece of faux-mystical soundtrackism escaping into a fantasy-movie ether; “Lavender Blimp” a sunkissed, heliocentric shrine to cockeyed hippiedom; “To the Love Within” a lazy jam that scatters its round-the-campfire instruments —booming percussion, brittle guitar, roughshod handclaps, posse vox— around a giant cavernous space.
Sadly, that just leaves, um, the rest of the record, whose joke-centric tenor soon grows tiring. Few listeners will wish to hear the spoken intro to “Duck People Duck Man” more than the once, you'd expect, yet Surfing is a record, a project, whose whole existence is to enshrine such moments —of fleeting, throwaway, barely-considered 'comedy'— in the cold, cold light of posterity.
I Guess You Had to Be There
Weighing Surfing up, it’s likely deserving of neither misfired praise nor scathing criticism. It’s not bad, by that most strict measurement, but it certainly can’t make any claim at greatness. Mostly, the album plays like what it is: an in-joke made public. And, like all in-jokes, Megapuss has a limited appeal. Meaning: unless you actually played on this record, you’re unlikely to find it funny.
Record Label: Vapor
Release Date: 4 November 2008
