Vetiver
Tight Knit
Rating: 3.5
Label: Sub Pop
Vetiver mainman Andy Cabic picked the perfect name for his indie-folk project. Vetiver is a grass native to Asia and often used in the home for its soothing aroma as well as a method to relieve the heat of Asian summers. The cultivated grass is hung in a window or doorway, moistened with water, for cooling the living quarters as air currents pass through its leaves. Vetiver, the band, has a similar effect. Tight Knit, Cabic’s fourth album and first for Sub Pop, is 45 minutes of soothing, gauzy acoustics perfect for Sunday mornings or the archetypal coffeehouse of your dreams.
Cabic kicked around in a rock band named The Raymond Brake in his days at the University of North Carolina’s Greensboro campus before leaving for San Francisco at the end of the ’90s. As the story goes, he was attending art school and living in a cramped house with several other bohemians, where he got a closet for a bedroom. While living here, Vetiver was born in the gentle songs Cabic wrote to occupy himself in the tiny closet. Even though Tight Knit’s songs are fleshed out with drums, piano, bass, and sometimes cello, that closet is still heard in the overwhelming intimacy of the songs’ recordings.
The album’s lush atmospherics are its bread and butter, and call to mind the late work of American expatriate/songwriter Josh Rouse, especially his Country Mouse, City House, where the sound of soft rock is reexamined with an unironic ear. Tight Knit indeed seems like the work of a kid who grew up with ’70s mellow gold playing in the house. On opener “Rolling Sea,” Cabic’s vocal has all the gentleness and aching sincerity of Loggins & Messina’s “Danny’s Song.” “Another Reason to Go” recalls late ’70s Steely Dan, where Fagan and Becker tried to capture the physicality of Black American music as cleanly and sonically ‘perfect’ as they could in the studio. “Strictly Rule” has an organ melody reminiscent of Gerry & the Pacemakers’ “Ferry ‘Cross the Mersey,” without any of the baggage of the Mod ’60s. Final track “At Forrest Edge” is a beautiful, shimmering meditation on a past love whose image fades like a disappearing mist in a wooded area at morning.
Now, as much as Kenny Loggins makes my skin crawl, my above comparison is no insult. The fact that I have to reach back to “Danny’s Song” to draw a comparison speaks to Tight Knit’s refreshing sound in the current polyglot of indie rock sounds. In the midst of analog keyboard bloops and bleeps, In the Red’s tape distortion, and much of Sub Pop’s own emasculated crooners, Vetiver stands out as something special. Again and again on Tight Knit, Andy Cabic begs us to step out of ourselves, to join him on rolling seas or for the purpose of searching within ourselves to find out just why we don’t leave the ruts we’ve gotten ourselves into. While the songs themselves may not be outstandingly original, the tempting allure of the record’s production makes it hard not to follow Cabic.
by Chris Middleman
