Vetiver - Tight Knit

Release Date: February 17, 2009

★★★★★ Tracks:

Through the Front Door

Gone are the woodsy, fall sounds of Vetiver. The cellos and violins are silent. The guest collaborations from Banhart, Newsom and others are missing. This time around Andy Cabric elicits the warm tones of summer to try and craft a more inviting album. They add percussion to nearly every track, and experiment with electric guitars. The songwriting is more pop-oriented, as songs like “Sister” and “More of This” will leave you forgetting you are listening to a folk outfit. And while Tight Knit succeeds in being much more accessible than their debut, it’s also more generic. There isn’t much variance between what's here and what most alternative-folk enthusiasts already have in their libraries: “Rolling Sea” brings early Ryan Adams to mind, “Everyday” should appeal to Badly Drawn Boy fans, and “On the Other Side” sounds like a song produced by the plethora of current Calexico-style country rockers you've already heard. There is one song I’ll be sure to keep however, and although “Through the Front Door” could fit snugly on Beck’s Sea Change, I just can’t get past how damn gorgeous it is.

Vetiver - Vetiver

Release Dates: May 18, 2004

★★★★★ Tracks:

Los Pajaros del Rio

Amerilie

Another artist in my library I hadn’t ever given a chance, Vetiver produce the sort of lonely, intimate folk that brings those early lo-fi records from Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine to mind. I enjoy and own nearly every Elliott Smith album ever made but I’m easily bored by most percussion-less records. At first Vetiver was no different. However after a couple of times listening to beautifully crafted tracks “Amerilie” and “Aboretum,” and tuning in to the poetic lyrics of “Luna Sea,” the album has begun to resonate.

Vetiver is at its best and most compelling when principal songwriter, Andy Cabric, allows his acoustic guitar to take a backseat to the other instrumentalists included: Joanna Newsom lends her whimsical harp on “Amerilie,” Devendra Banhart provides some stellar finger-picking guitar leads throughout the album, and co-wrote the Spanish, “Los Pajaros del Rio,” but the most interesting dynamic comes from the dual layers of cello and violin frequenting the majority of the tracks. There are a couple of misfires; I find “Amour Fou’s” vocals to be overkill, and a few songs like “Without a Song” and “Belles” linger on too long, leaving me impatient, but overall Vetiver has surprised me. This isn’t a record you are going to put on to start a weekend to, but it’s the type of restrained, woodsy folk that's damn near perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon or a sleepy-eyed commute to work.