Vetiver Spans

originally published January 31, 2007

It could be said that I grew up hearing Andy Cabic’s music. This assertion figures on a few different levels. First: literally, I did. His first band of note, The Raymond Brake, a precursor to his current outfit Vetiver, worked out of my hometown of Greensboro, NC, and when I was a kid, it seemed that the group played near-weekly somewhere around town. It was part of the local landscape along with Mercury Birds, Rebar, and a handful of other long-losters who helped flavor the North Carolina scene that Archers of Loaf, Polvo and their collegiate, angular ilk a little to the east had forged a few years previous.

Given my proclivity for raging rather than shoegazing back then, I should say that I didn’t quite understand The Raymond Brake. I remember one night, a million years ago, sitting indian-style on a living room floor while the band jangled and clanged on into infinity, and feeling perplexed as to the point of it all. The guys didn’t seem all that interested in reaching me, and this factor, in and of itself, existed afoul of one of the sacred musical criteria I, at the time, so self-righteously claimed; they seemed hermetically sealed within their own droning D-chord suspensions, and the whole thing basically passed before me with all the gravity of a movie preview.

Now that I’m older, though, and have myself become interested in jangling and clanging and sometimes drifting toward far cold spheres, I feel I can appreciate it; listening to the band's records today, it occurs to me that The Raymond Brake represents an impressive reiteration of Beatles/ Big Star-type melodicism housed in the noisome lexicon of mid-'90s indie rock. The band often seems to be building monuments to classic popcraft out of the spiky shards left in the wake of, say, Sonic Youth or Mission of Burma. The Raymond Brake also had the killer chops to carry out abstract-in-the-name-of-innovation rhythmic interplay, and insistent in its best work is an energy and drive that casts the emotionalism of Cabic’s vocals into striking, bold relief.

Vital, I feel, to my reappraisal of the group is my advancing age. These days, my intellect stands a fighting chance against my id, and my emotional palette has expanded beyond the darker primary colors of the simple caveman heart. I’m older and maybe calmer and a little smarter, hopefully, and therefore I can reach to understand a bit more of where these guys were coming from; this truism holds in my appreciation of Cabic’s current deal - the bucolic, mellifluous Vetiver.

My girlfriend Page and I were driving around the sticks listening to Vetiver’s latest disc To Find Me Gone, the band's third, and we had the windows down and the sun was streaming in, making us a little love-drunk, because it was way too warm for winter and the stereo was CRANKED as we shot through the fields, and in a cut gap between songs, Page said something pithy: “This,” she said, “sounds like music for grown ups.” It was only then that I recognized the good bit of Paul Simon extant in Cabic’s singing; matter of fact, several songs on To Find Me Gone hazard what it would’ve been like had Rhymin’ Simon the right idea all along as far as production goes, and instead of getting head-over-heels into African sounds, he’d been interested in emulating Middle Eastern music with a chamber-music quartet.

I love the first Vetiver record, the self-titled one from 2004, and it makes plenty of sense to me. The guitar playing is beautiful throughout, and the lyrics reverberate with some real daily truth. There’s a song on there about watching people downtown at night, where they’re “shy, cerebral in the lonely air.” Another one, “Arboretum” has this compound-time melody that slays me, and in less than two minutes’ time communicates wonderfully a joyful, universal scenario: it’s about waking on a morning to take a drive with your friend. Now that I think on it for a second, my affection for that song explains that country-drive with my girl when first we spun this new record.

Because that record is played primarily on acoustic instruments, and because Devendra Banhart sings and picks on it, the band got lumped in with the California “freak-folk” scene. It's an inappropriate designation. The first batch of Vetiver songs presents an expansion of Cabic’s dedication to the singular, lovely melody; that first record sounds like it sprang fully-formed from some rogue, backwoods Beatles session where the only thing lacking was electricity. It seemed to me that he’d evolved, and in doing so had merely shifted musical templates, from the obtuse electric rock of his first band, to the simpler and somehow more appropriate-seeming instrumentation of Vetiver’s debut.

Now it seems that the group has adopted Banhart’s backward-glancing musical tendency for its own. To Find Me Gone plays like an adventurously imagined, well-executed songwriter-plus-band record somehow lost from the mellow cavalcade of mid-1970s rock. Gone are the grand sweeps of pure melody; we now have a dense collection of paeans to a handful of venerable influences, most of which are old enough to have a kid who can kick a soccer ball and cut his own meat.

My favorite track is the first one, “Been So Long,” a shadowy droner with a tabla-heartbeat in its chest, bright vocal-harmony in its higher-reaches and a simple set of lyrics that greet you warmly at the threshold; the tune is distinctive because it subverts the songwriterly conventions that the record’s remainder leans on: it’s a monochord affair, inherently non-western, and the acoustic guitar only surfaces a full two-thirds of the way through. Next up is “You May Be Blue,” a low-key shuffle, vibe-haunted and darkly textured, calling to mind the first Steely Dan record. These two songs set a general pattern for the entire album; it vacillates from idiosyncratic solo-songwriter material, inventively-colored and subtly enhanced, to the jangly rock-band cuts that sound instantly familiar via their evincement of a myriad of influences, both specific and general: there’s a good bit of the '70s Quaalude-cowboy trip in there, the vestiges of shoegaze, and good deep doses of Big Star’s Sister Lovers, Muswell Hillbilly Kinks and the late-model Byrds. The album’s keystone, “I Know No Pardon,” feels exactly like a Desire-era Dylan outtake, replete with outlaw stance, a central metaphor that revolves around a poker game, and a running time that nears the seven-minute mark.

Present in Vetiver’s touring party are some serious players, including Espers’ Otto Hauser, who drums on Bert Jansch’s new Black Swan record, and Sanders Trippe, formerly of Rebar and All Night, whose singular guitar work somehow manages to iceskate the astral plane and tear wounds in the wall all at once. Appropriately, they’re touring with revitalized '60s folkie Vashti Bunyan [see interview on p. 30], who shared a scene and a sound with several of the notables who show up in their own sonic formula; I hear tell there will be sets from each act, and then all will join together for a band-spanning jam that should call directly to mind Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue or some other by-now legendary all-star tour from long ago.

Like I said first-off, this is music I grew up listening to; actually, it's music we all grew up listening to. This is the music you heard in your parents’ tape deck on your way to school, music that's new but that you know mysteriously to the marrows of your bones; it’s been stuck in your craw all the while, whether you realized it or not.

Jim McHugh