#12(a): Cripple Crow and #12(b): Lookaftering

Devendra Banhart: Cripple Crow
Vashti Bunyan: Lookaftering
I feel like I can cheat and make this a list of 26 in this instance, because without Vashti Bunyan, there may be no Devendra Banhart, and without Devendra Banhart, we may not have the return of Vashti Bunyan.

Devendra Banhart has been a busy man over the past couple years, cranking out two excellent acoustically-driven folk albums last year alone. Cripple Crow sees him expanding in all directions--packing songs into one long album, adding other instruments including an electric guitar, singing in Spanish, and generally hopping genres like a bizarro-folk version of Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour of Bewliderbeast. The cover suggests that another reference point is Sgt. Pepper's...

A frequent topic on Cripple Crow is childhood, and two of its poppiest tracks, "Long-Haired Child" and "I Feel Just Like a Child" are masterful and memorable. The mother of Banhart's children is certainly Bunyan, whose one album in the '70s, Just Another Diamond Day, went from obscure toidol of hipsterfolk. The prevailing sentiment of Lookaftering is time-honored wisdom, and Bunyan exists to me, fairly or unfairly, as a female version of Nick Drake that outsmarted death, and instead just went away for a while.