Album Review: To Find Me Gone by Vetiver

For a few months in 2002, I lived across the street from Devendra Banhart in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was my roommate's boyfriend's roommate -- not what you'd call a close friend. But my proximity afforded me early access to what would be Banhart's debut album, which he had recorded straight to four-track. Comprising short songs full of playful, helium crooning and gently picked guitar, Oh Me Oh My sounded magnificently out of time, like something Marc Bolan would've released if he were an Alabama sharecropper in the 1930s.

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With his second album, Vetiver mainstay Andy Cabic continues to make low-key folk-rock with a mildly psychedelic tinge that will appeal to fans of his friend Devendra Banhart. While Cabic's songs are at their heart placid reflective works, they're given some dreamy, at times trance-like ambience with the layering of sighing backup vocals, subliminal background droning elements, and campfire-in-the-woods percussion. At times he sounds like Marc Bolan in his early days (especially on the closing track, "Down at El Rio"), though without an edge that's as eccentric or grating.

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Andy Cabic, the man behind Vetiver, has a gift for writing memorable instrumental passages. His songs don’t have hooks, exactly – he doesn’t do much to set off the choruses, and his lead vocals are quiet and masked with a little bit of reverb. Where Vetiver’s new album, To Find Me Gone, excels is in the thirty seconds or so between verses, or the last minute of each song.

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