Mala

(Nonesuch)

Discursive, meandering, a little ramshackle, this latest album from the Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter is a frequently lovely, pied beauty. Amid the pretty cul-de-sacs and wafting, slightly inconsequential ditties on this, his eighth album in nine years, are neat pop songs such as Never Seen Such Good Things, which you can imagine soundtracking a lazy summer day. In general, the tone is over-relaxed and frayed, apart from the intriguing but frustratingly short Golden Girls, with its hushed menace, and on the spooky A Gain, in which Banhart breathes sinister nursery rhyme phrases into the microphone while odd noises scratch in the background. That shadowy tunes such as this exist alongside more sunny, if unusual, pop songs such as the bleeping, jaunty Won't You Come Over is part of the record's inconsistency. One day Banhart might write a worldwide hit. You feel he has it in him. Until then, patchy but lovely records such as this will do just fine.