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SXSW Review: Vetiver at Radio Room Patio
(11 p.m., Thursday)
Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic looks like he’s spent a lot of time staring at the cover of Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album, sporting as he did a porkpie hat and a scraggly neck-beard at last night’s Sub Pop showcase. But instead of taking his folk to the country, like Dylan, Cabic took it to the canyon, as in the blissed-out Laurel Canyon of the ’60s, where the Byrds and Joni Mitchell and the Mamas & the Papas blurred into one.
The set’s prevailing mood was overwhelmingly sweet - we’re talking Burt Bacharach outtakes for the bicycle-riding scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” - when put into the context of the hard-rocking bands comprising the rest of the lineup. The listless audience said it all: chat, text, chat, text. But that didn’t stop Cabic from earnestly cooing about the many permutations of love, happiness and natural wonders that permeate his band’s glistening new album, “Tight Knit.”
The four-piece band backing Cabic absorbed his grace under pressure by closing their eyes and channeling the music gods. They made manifest delightful harmonies and well-measured playing. They were rewarded by Cabic with an occasional detour from pop into something more akin to a Jefferson Airplane incantation (“At Forest Edge”) or even a bossa-nova number (“Sister”). It was bound to happen: psychedelia, mixing and matching, outside-the-box thinking. Cabic is an apostle of freak-folk main man Devendra Banhart, after all.
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By JL
March 23, 2009 9:44 PM | Link to this
Darn rude SXSW crowd! I’m going to see them in Asheville by way of Chicago and cannot wait. What could be better than love, happiness and natural wonders.