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Zero 7
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed albums.
What Will We Be
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 7 votes
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Album Info
Label: Warner Bros./Reprise
Release Date: 27 October 2009
Discs: 1 disc
Genre(s): Folk
Summary
The first album on his new label for the folk singer was co-produced with Paul Butler.
Also By This Artist: Cripple Crow Niño Rojo Rejoicing In The Hands Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
Also On The Web: Official Artist Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The Onion (A.V. Club)
On this, his major-label bow, the (now beardless!) prince of freak-folk has harnessed his many left-field tics and energies to craft his most elegantly driven work yet.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times
He filches from a variety of genres--Brazilian Tropicalia, glam rock, lounge jazz, Zeppelin-like psychedelia--but it never sounds awkward. He loosens the stitches on each to fashion his own unique costume.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly
Maybe he's listening a little too closely to his spirit animal, but either way, the guy sure sounds inspired. [30 Oct 2009, p.58]
All Music Guide
Banhart's persona emerges intact despite the mainstream sound, however, and What Will We Be becomes a pleasantly fresh album to follow the ponderous, sprawling "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon."
Read Full Review >NOW Magazine
Some will be sad to find that his pulsating vocals and wacky storytelling have subsided, and that his vague lyrics have grown simpler. But anyone who’s avoided Banhart’s hippy-busker tunes now have a reason to give him a chance.
Read Full Review >Q Magazine
Mark this down as the point which we can say with certainty for the first time Devendra Banhart is here for the long run. [Nov 2009, p.113]
The Phoenix
Even when Banhart seems more in a predicament than in the zone, he’s hopelessly inventive. Several songs experience complete transformations over their modest three-minute spans, succeeding like little daybreaks.
Read Full Review >Billboard.com
This time the quintet holed up for two months in a Northern California cabin, and the resulting collection from the idiosyncratic singer/songwriter is intimate, experimental, and ultimately accessible.
Read Full Review >Prefix Magazine
Banhart clearly gets bogged down in that freedom, as the amount of sheer hokiness on some of his albums can attest to. But with What Will We Be, Banhart gets back to earning that right for total creative freedom.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone
The sixth studio album by Devendra Banhart is the best he's ever made. What Will We Be is also great enough in patchouli-scented spurts to suggest that the 28-year-old singer-songwriter's defining classic is one more record and a little more focus away.
Read Full Review >New Musical Express
Butler’s done well to harness the fuller ideas first explored on "Smokey" but, in doing so, has sacrified raw Devendra for something just a bit too, well, Bees-y.
Read Full Review >Spin
A big improvement over 2007's ho-hum "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon," it's also the most consistently satisfying full-length he's made.
Read Full Review >Paste Magazine
What once made Banhart such a strange bird--roaming from jazz to folk to indie pop, often within a single song, as on the impossibly catchy 'Chin Chin & Muck Muck'--now seems almost mainstream, as if the rest of the pop world has not only caught up with him, but left him in its dust.
Read Full Review >Uncut
What Will We Be stands as a fittingly ambiguous, partly frustrating and altogether fascinating response to that question. Call it artful artlessness, or vice versa.
Read Full Review >PopMatters
It’s not surprising that What Will We Be sounds, then, like a relaxed, slightly crisper take on the ideas that informed his previous release. This haze of lazy Tropicalia, occasionally interrupted by an indulged moment of proggy vamp, isn’t necessarily a compromise.
Read Full Review >Mojo
For every throughly relised composition, there is a meandering fragment, great only as far as it goes. [Nov 2009, p.90]
Alternative Press
Tellingly, 'Angelika' and 'Maria Leonza' only get comfortably loose and silly when halfway finished. With a Strokes-y guitar part and a driving backbeat, the innovative '16th & Valencia, Roxy Music' is hopefully what Banhart will be in the future. [Dec 2009, p.108]
Dusted Magazine
Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.
Read Full Review >musicOMH.com
One can't escape the feeling that, for a writer and performer of Banhart's undoubted talents, this album sees him rather treading water, and failing to match the originality of his persona with correspondingly original or engaging material.
Read Full Review >Slant Magazine
Through supplementation and wider instrumentation, he's traded in quiet haunting oddness for drowsy tranquil oddness, an exchange that may at some time pay better dividends than it does here.
Read Full Review >Under The Radar
It's easy to lay the rap on Banhart's drifting towards the middle of the road with the fuller, whole-band sound he's embraced, or the bigger labels or the greater notoriety, but the fault clearly lies with Banhart himself, who has become a lot easier to understand. [Fall 2009, p.56]
Pitchfork
More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.
Read Full Review >Drowned In Sound
There’s some interest to be found but for the most part he displays a real lack of daring.
Read Full Review >Tiny Mix Tapes
What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this album is 7.1 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
