As unlikely as it sounds, the fairy tale might be the very next epicenter of indie inspiration: the intersection between underground music and storybook musings has never been so curiously explicit, with contemporary bands starting to mine, unapologetically, the willfully suspended disbelief that goes along with bedtime stories and ancient cautionary fables.
Psych-folk warblers Vetiver (with Andy Cabic, Devendra Banhart, Alissa Anderson, and Jim Gaylord) have opted to cluster, hold hands, and skip the line between deviously surreal and lullingly pleasant, leading us all very, very deep into the forest, leaving no trail of breadcrumbs in sight. Vetiver could very well be the blurry soundtrack to a delirious fever dream: The band's self-titled debut is a dizzyingly euphoric tangle of freaked-out folk and scratchy strings, all twisted sheets and sweaty brows, upside-down trees and wicked flowers. Anchored by Cabic's tousled vocals and Banhart's amber guitar strums, Vetiver is swampy and sublime, a compelling mix of sweet, candlelit laments and jagged hymns.
A sizable clump of guest-players help out here-- Joanna Newsom tickles a harp ("Amerile"), Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval offers backing coos ("Angels' Share"), and former My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm O'Ciosoig putters stoically at his kit ("Luna Sea", "On a Nerve"). But it's Devendra Banhart who ultimately infuses Cabic's soft, fraying songs with wooly layers of warmth. Banhart's semi-infamous transcontinental loping (see substantial stints in Paris and Venezuela, and a handful of years logged as a roaming mistral, squatting, playing, and recording songs on a friend's answering machine) tend to pump his solo records full of whimsy, and unsurprisingly, Banhart's nomadic tendencies lend Vetiver the same kind of strange, rambling diversity.
"Amour Fou", one of two songs Banhart co-wrote with Cabic, is so charmingly bizarre that listening feels a little bit like pedaling through the French countryside on a three-seat bicycle: precarious, exuberant, and inexcusably weird. Scratchy banjo, acoustic guitar, and a bit of bass tumble together girlishly, while Banhart and Cabic enthusiastically bellow, "Love-love-love-love-crazy love/ Amour fou-ooooh!" Curl your fingers around the handlebars and let the purple streamers fly: No matter how hard you try, Vetiver is too blissfully strange for your sofa alone.
Cabic's delicate voice (as previously heard in the Simple Machines band The Raymond Brake) can swing from salty to sweet within a single syllable, and is anchored here only by his gingerly picked guitar and yawning swells of violin-- like a gentler Tom Waits (or a throatier Donovan), Cabic is happy to marry the familiar and the strange, warbling quietly (and occasionally in romance languages) over plucky layers of instrumentation. "Without a Song" bashfully mixes high and low noisemaking, with impeccable cello and violin lines rubbing up against prehistoric foot-tapping-as-percussion, while opener "Oh Papa" swirls contentedly, strings and guitar finding easy communion.
Blame Thom Monahan's naked production, or the band's presumably ancient instruments, but something about Vetiver feels entirely anachronistic, impossibly devoid of 21st century stamps. Still, while Vetiver have successfully eschewed contemporary gloss in favor of following weird, primeval whims, their neo-psych musings are always tender and accessible, as quirky and warm as a well-worn Nick Drake tape. Somehow, all lyric abstractions and structural foibles seem perfectly reasonable in context, each ancient folksong gloriously comprehensible, despite incompatibility of time and place. Thus, when Cabic howls about "the shape of things to come" (on closing epic "On a Nerve"), it somehow seems like far more than just a thinly veiled Ornette Coleman reference, or a vague prediction-- it sounds like a promise for the future.
