The voice of Vetiver leader Andy Cabic doesn’t enter Complete Strangers, the project’s sixth album, for more than 100 seconds. Instead, refracted guitars, neon keyboards, and muffled saxophones percolate around a padded house beat and a drum kit’s gentle kick. A half-dozen players rise steadily into a krautrock-like sprawl, their textures swirling around the constant thump. When at last Cabic arrives with a few lines about the disorienting effects of insomnia as the dawn breaks, he sounds small, diffident and unsettled, like he’s still finding his place within the very band he’s built. "Out in the real world/ Confusion’s keeping score," he meekly offers in the first chorus. His voice fights to stay above the backing: "Out in the real world/ Close calls and closing doors."
The song, the sentiment and Cabic’s hesitation to lead both represent a one-tune summary not only of the vexing, indecisive Complete Strangers but also of Vetiver’s career of equivocal output. After the end of his primo North Carolina indie rock outfit the Raymond Brake in the late '90s, Cabic dispatched to San Francisco. Vetiver emerged there several years later as part of the young century’s wild freak-folk entourage. The group’s self-titled 2004 debut delivered a placid and promising collection of gentle ballads and eclectic exercises, making Cabic an easy counterpart for tourmates and collaborators Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart.
But for the next several years, members drifted in and out of Vetiver as the leader pulled sideman and production duties for a dozen others. Vetiver struggled for self-definition, seeking it in a set of cover records and several albums that only grew more unfocused. There were moments of folk-rock shamble and Laurel Canyon bliss, power-trio crunch, and New Wave languor, all linked by a thin thread of psychedelic pop wanderlust. Complete Strangers, which scans like the faceless mixtape of a J.Crew annual spring clearance sale, encapsulates that decade-long conundrum with 10 thin tracks.
Cabic tries on a variety of guises during Complete Strangers. With shimmering guitars and carousel keyboards, "Loose Ends" suggests the easy jangle of the Byrds as recreated by power-pop champions Sloan. "Time Flies" flits through gentle tropicália, rhythms shuffling behind a guitar duet between Cabic and Banhart, who appears on his first Vetiver album since 2006. "Current Carry" laps in the same warm Pacific waters as Jack Johnson and John Butler, a bulbous bass line bouncing beneath syncopated acoustic strums and the lightest funk. "Shadows Lane" explores a reverberating melancholy that recalls the Clientele’s late, great records. Cabic’s croon floats like a whisper above a gentle drum trot and clouds of echo.
Supported by producer Thom Monahan, who has remained a constant on all Vetiver albums, and a crack team of musicians familiar from many of those releases, Cabic delivers all of these looks competently. In particular, he sells "Edgar", a slow-burning ballad built for a miniature orchestra and the album’s best moment. And he sounds at ease with closer "Last Hurrah", a halcyon folk-rock number. He clearly gets all these forms he’s exploring. Too often, though, the songs sound like mere skeletons constructed from obvious and disconnected influences. After a spin or two, there’s no reason to revisit much of Complete Strangers, nothing left to discover aside from just how threadbare these tunes are. The richness of Cabic’s forebears eludes him, as though he’s too busy moving between styles to commit to any of them. He does a lot to highlight his predecessors’ work but very little to advance it.
A vague feeling of regret lingers throughout much of Complete Strangers. Cabic announces his discontent with dreams during "Confiding" and his unease with the exigencies of everyday existence during "Backwards Slowly". He bemoans the fame of others at one point and decries the luck of other people’s big breaks during another. Never before has Vetiver’s presiding melancholy been so bitter, but it’s understandable, too. After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways. "I’m still figuring the album out," Cabic wrote in the note that announced Complete Strangers. "It feels like someone I’ve just met yet known for a long time." That is an apt assessment of Vetiver’s discography at large, too—a catalog full of familiar shapes made by someone who has yet to figure out how to make them function as one. It’s as if, after a decade, Vetiver is waiting for Andy Cabic’s real voice to enter the mix at last.
