Vetiver: Down From Above

I didn't set out to show off some sort of range or anything. I'm sure there's many people who would hear it and NOT hear that range at all, taking it all as sort of subdued and quiet. I always liken it to painting. A painter spends an inordinate time working and staring at this space and then this person is going to just walk by it in a museum or gallery and look at it for 30 seconds. I never expect I'm going to get 'time spent' in return that I spent on it, but it's nice when that happens.

-Andy Cabic on the new album

Photo of Vetiver by: Alissa Anderson

While frequently tagged as California hippies making mellow rock, Vetiver draws inspiration from a vast, unpredictable pool of ancestors. Their 2008 cover tune album, Thing of the Past (and companion EP, More of the Past) went some distance at showing there's more going on below the surface than Crosby, Stills & Nash and the like.

Vetiver by Alissa Anderson

"It was reductive on one level because people then assumed that was my universe of songwriters but it was more about expressing a connection with these songs and knowing they were ones we could do well," offers Cabic, whose picks include Hawkwind, Loudon Wainwright III, Michael Hurley, Garland Jeffreys, Townes Van Zandt and more. "My listening habits are WIDE. I'm just as likely to put on a Go-Betweens record as I am some new, minimal techno thing or Skeeter Davis or a Can record or whatever."

Tight Knit resonates this diversity but in a way that defies one to follow the accents back to their sources. It is, without question, their most blended album to date, and as such it may not leap out quite as quickly as their previous original release, 2006's To Find Me Gone (JamBase review). However, Tight Knit is a quintessential grower that amply rewards a slow drip into the subconscious leaving behind a rich yet elusive aftertaste.

"The album is a collection of songs and different approaches that I found a way to sequence together with the album art and title to kind of unify them. For a while there I wasn't sure it was gonna work, but in the end I think it did," Cabic says. "I didn't set out to show off some sort of range or anything. I'm sure there's many people who would hear it and NOT hear that range at all, taking it all as sort of subdued and quiet. I always liken it to painting. A painter spends an inordinate time working and staring at this space and then this person is going to just walk by it in a museum or gallery and look at it for 30 seconds. I never expect I'm going to get 'time spent' in return that I spent on it, but it's nice when that happens."

Vetiver by Alissa Anderson

"I'm also not terrifically prolific, so this is also what I had [laughs]. Some people will write a lot of material and whittle it down so some things don't make an album. I tend to just work on what I know will make it," says Cabic. "I'm not really sure what ultimately makes it hang together. In a way, like all of the records, there's a core of acoustic guitar and vocals underlying it all, which is just how I write. And you can either have the guitar finger-picked and really textural and have that filigree that gives the song its body or you can smooth it out and have it be just rhythm. I think that's what a lot of people who want to define us as folk hear. But, [Tight Knit] has a lot more keyboards, electric guitar and drums and bass on every track."

Though possibly a stretch for some ears, this writer picks up on some of the winged loft of U2 in the new material, say "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" or "A Sort of Homecoming" stripped of bombast but not their heart tickling sparkle. Vetiver is also developing a poppier edge that's not dissimilar to the Irish quartet's moves that ultimately landed them in the Top 10. It's pop but pop crafted on their terms and not the prevailing markets. All Music remarked that Tight Knit's "Everyday" was "peppy, perfect for a soda pop commercial." Really?

"[Laughs] Oh, I certainly was working on pushing things in as poppy a direction as I knew how. Probably what they're saying is in popular culture typically ridiculously catchy songs like Feist's '1, 2, 3, 4' wind up proving it in some ad. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, but I did push things as far as I could as far as catchiness goes," says Cabic, whose music actively reaches out – it's engaging and easy to enjoy in a hurry – but in musical not commercially minded ways. "It's not always been that way. For a while the body of our music was more melancholic and quiet and didn't survive in a bar atmosphere. But this album has more songs that allow us, in a live setting, to take things in different directions depending on what the setting is like."

"I think we're still figuring it all out," says Cabic, putting a fittingly opaque, oblique spot of punctuation on our conversation, keeping the edges of his private galaxy open and ready for further exploration.

Vetiver tour dates available here.