NOT FREAKY, NOT FOLKY Vetiver

Vetiver’s new album, The Errant Charm, totally won me over, so I spent a little time talking to Andy Cabic and his long-time producer Thom Monahan about it for Blurt.

"When a critic calls Vetiver a leading freak folk band, that, to me, immediately marks them as not knowing what they're talking about," says Andy Cabic, the band's singer and songwriter. Yes, it's true that Cabic once lived in the same house as Devendra Banhart, that the two sometimes wrote songs together and that Banhart sang on the first Vetiver album. It is also a fact that Cabics' band was included on the genre-defining compilation Golden Apples of the Sun and played on a 2004 tour with Banhart and Joanna Newsom that was memorialized in Kevin Barker's documentary The Family Jams.

And yet, there is nothing remotely folky about Cabic's fifth and best album, The Errant Charm, a landmark of understated, electronically-enhanced pop. Adds Cabic, "I've never really thought of us as a folk band and I never really felt any affinity for the tag freak folk, either. "

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