12 Songs Of Peace & Music
Never has a record been more aptly titled. Vetiver’s third album, Thing Of The Past, finds San Franciscan neo-hippy Andy Cabic trawling through his second-hand vinyl collection —photographed in retro stylings for the album art— and covering a selection of circa-1970 cuts. Rather than radically reinterpreting the stylistically-similar songs, Cabic plays them straight. Recorded entirely in analogue, Thing Of The Past desperately tries to conjure an imaginary moment in which folk, rock, Americana, and psychedelia all melted together in a haze of goodwill, free love, and hallucinogenic drugs.
In Dust We Trust
Covering types like Townes Van Zandt, Norman Greenbaum, Neil Young protégé Elyse, and Band collaborateur Bobby Charles, the set alternates between jug-band bomp and sunburnt lament, with sinewy slide-guitar and Cabic’s croaky croon ever-present. The Vetiver main-man’s goal may be to cast these tunes anew, but his warm-hearted, tonally-authentic takes come across as overly reverent. Thing Of The Past buys into the baby-boomer nostalgia buried in the dusty grooves of his old vinyl, Cabic’s earnest, toothless take on back-in-the-day wantonly peddling the myth that it was a ‘golden age’.
Record Label: Gnomonsong/Fat Cat
Release Date: 13 May 2008
