The prospect of seeing a band seemingly in thrall to peak-popularity Fleetwood Mac in a Shoreditch basement intrigued. Could San Francisco's Vetiver reproduce the glossy sheen of new album The Errant Charm live? The answer was no, and last night’s London show was all the better for that. As the guitars intertwined, the sonic swirl was more akin to a Seventies LA version of shoegazing than a recreation of the seductive West Coast sound.
The time shift aspect of Vetiver is distracting in a live setting. It’s impossible to look at North Carolina transplant Andy Cabic and his band without being aware of the pasts that are being dipped into. Unlike a straight revival band in regulation period-style gear, there’s more subtlety at play here. Chins need stroking during these “ah yes” moments. A Vetiver crowd is never going to go too wild.
Cabic has never been shy about acknowledging his interests in the past. Vetiver’s explicitly titled 2008 album Thing of the Past was a covers set, collecting songs by writers that had influenced Cabic from Michael Hurley, Biff Rose and more – mostly country or folk-slanted songwriters, with the exception of “Hurry on Sundown”, an early acoustic song by Hawkwind. The following year's Tight Knit was less folky and nodded towards a glossier early-Seventies singer-songwriter style. Previous to Vetiver, in the mid-Nineties, Cabic had been in The Raymond Brake, an outfit with post-rock textures, as well as bits of folk and shoegazing. Although Vetiver are lumped in with the freak-folk/free-folk scene which first brought Cabic attention, he's never stood still, whether going forwards or back. Nowadays, he’s moving forwards, it’s just that the years he’s moving through are those of over 30 years ago.
Kicking off last night’s set with The Errant Charm’s Fleetwood Mac-esque “Wonder Why” momentarily suggested Cabic was going to embrace the smoothed-out style of the new album. But played live, the song was more propulsive, more engaging. That said, the new album’s most rocking moment, The Velvet Underground-styled “Ride, Ride, Ride” was missing from the set and the one-song encore. Once tuned into, the difference between the sound of The Errant Charm and the live model Vetiver became less noticeable. “Hard to Break” stuck with album arrangement, despite the gently raised level of tension.
Two songs were key at XOYO. "Luna Sea", originally heard on 2004’s eponymous debut album, retained its fragmented, portmanteau structure and ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears" organ, but was now filtered through the soft focus of 2011’s Vetiver. The other striking song was a cover of The Go-Betweens' “Streets of Your Town”, the most energetic performance of the night. Cabic seemed to be able to let go, where he couldn't with his own songs.
Even though, musically, he’s not the freak-folker of yore, Cabic still sports the regulation facial hair. In his recent book Retromania, Simon Reynolds remarked that the beards worn by the free/freak-folkers are inherent to their guiding fantasy of “the unsettled wilderness of early America”. With Cabic having embraced the urban and urbane studio gloss of Seventies LA on The Errant Charm, one wonders if the beard’ll stay. Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsay Buckingham eventually lopped his off, while Mick Fleetwood never bothered.
In a few years Cabic could catch up with the Eighties and buy a razor. At some point, he might even meet his own past.
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