Knowing ahead of time that Devendra Banhart's new album, Niņo Rojo, was the planned companion to last April's superb Rejoicing in the Hands, and, in fact, was to comprise songs all culled from the same marathon 2003 recording session, I was subject to some skepticism during the wait for Amazon to send me a copy. Would this second sibling be noticeably weaker than Rejoicing? Were my high expectations already a miasmic bias? Might Niņo even surpass them? Could one inspired musican release two albums in the same year with enough solid material on each to warrant both a spot in the ranks of the year's best/favorites?

The greatest point of skepticism one can level at Banhart is to wonder how he thinks he can accomplish so much armed just with his guitar, his outre drawings, and his genuinely unorthodox way. And yet, he does. Although embellished here and there with light touches of brass or a piano, the tracks on Niņo Rojo stand for themselves as bizarre-blues gems sung by the bum in the subway station. The single "At the Hop" rivals Rejoicing's "This is the Way" for exquisite grace, and the CD offers a six-minute video clip of a different, six-minute version of the song featuring Bahart, his sketches, and his friends.

Nothing on the new album is as one-of-a-kind as Rejoicing's "Tit Smoking in the Temple of Artesian Mimicry" or "Rejoicing", nor are any of the tracks as experimental as most of his brilliant debut Oh Me Oh My, but Banhart's uncanny lyrical invention is just as potent as ever. On "Little Yellow Spider," his rapid but articulate delivery of lyrics like "Well, I came upon a dancing crab, and I stopped to watch it shake/ I said, "Dance for me just one more time/ Before you hibernate and you come out a crab cake" hints at Gilbert and Sullivan -esque patter, with a more sinister wit. That later in the song he draws out absurdly each syllable of the word "psychadelically" is a humorous juxtoposition to the mile-a-minute dexterity with which the rest of the song is sung. It is this moment to moment irreverance that makes Banhart such a startling and fresh artist. He is always read to re-invent his own material, to stretch out vowels in his trademark warble.

It is this same chronic re-invention that, as I found out Sunday evening (11/7), makes him an astoundingly charismatic life performer, and enhances the appreciation of his music. continue...