Devendra Banhart - At the HopThis is still my favorite song from Niño Rojo, which is still my favorite Devendra Banhart album. "At the Hop" is simple and charming, a quiet & funny anecdote, the kind of thing where, if you overheard it, you'd count yourself lucky. There's the weirdly quaint ("greaseball heaven, with Candypants, and Archie too") next to the weirdly direct ("put me in your dry dreams--put me in your wet, oh if you haven't yet"), and listening to this I can remember why, at the time of this album's release, Devendra Banhart was THE GUY, for all intents and purposes the face and living embodiment of freak-folk (the Spirit of Beard made flesh). This was when each newly pressed CD-R on foxy digitalis was snatched up by people, okay, some people, okay, just me, with the sort of undiscerning mania you see in shoppers right before Christmas. Of course it all fell victim to entropy, exhaustion, imitation, weakness, and diffusion--but for a little while there, the freak-folk juggernaut (old guitars, redwood logs, mud from Max Yasgur's farm, eagle feathers, tons of quartz crystals) seemed like it would never stop.[Buy Niño Rojo]