For the most part, the songs on sometime freak-folk singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart’s ninth album are downbeat but heartfelt, his wry words backed by minimalist guitar lines and unobtrusive synths. Indeed, there’s so little going on in the mid-section of Linda that the sparse guitar strums end up sounding as lonely as the song’s protagonist. Jonathan Richman homage Jon Lends a Hand (“Oh Jonathan, Jonathan/These are your chords/I’m borrowing them”), meanwhile, is genuinely charming. All of which makes the two songs at the centre of the album – the self-consciously wacky Fancy Man and the sleazy disco of Fig in Leather – sound incongruous. It makes for an incoherent, slightly unsatisfactory whole.
