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Devendra Banhart: What Will We Be

Warner Bros./Reprise

On What Will We Be, his seventh album, Devendra Banhart walks a bizarre line between sophisticated psych-folk and the chance that—with a spiffy new major label contract and the occasional celebrity girlfriend—he may achieve heartthrob/figurehead status among a new generation of hippies. Developing his almost-outsider strumming into rich tropicalia-like changes, the 28-year-old songwriter produces a batch of sun-dappled mellowness that sounds alternately like a reggae-inflected Strokes (“Baby,” “16th & Valencia”) and a significantly more baked Paul Simon (“Goin’ Back To the Place”) without losing an ounce of Banhart’s playfully froggy vocals. There’s cosmic kitsch, to be sure (“Chin Chin & Muck Muck”), but Banhart stays on target: exquisite songwriting, gorgeous production. There’s no question mark in the album title, but the answer is probably “blissful.”