“Right away, you looked like a good friend / Like someone I knew when, I lived back in Ohio long ago”. Right here, Andy Cabic, the man behind Vetiver, could be waxing lyrical on the very record these words crop up on. On albums like these, where the pace is mid-tempo and the chords are all sunken and slowly-applied, you feel familiar with how the whole thing’s going to pan out, far before it gets into its stride.

It also helps to know the career of Vetiver to date: Consider that Cabic releases records with Devendra Banhart; that his favourite festival is the chilled-out Green Man; that Vetiver as a name was taken from a type of Indian leaf. His records hardly rouse the most intense of emotions or induce a good dance-off. That’s obviously not the intention. Like previous efforts, The Errant Charm gets by on credit of being a relaxing and soothing talk on American folk. Constantly throughout its tenure, it has this almost irritatingly calm demeanour; like the pragmatic good-guy in romantic comedies who always manages to make a reserved, well-judged decision in the face of a nasty plot or an uptight, snappy Jennifer Aniston. So quiescent, it seems pleased with itself.

Any potentially poignant emotional content is shrouded in sullen synthetics, ones you’d usually associate with landscape shots of sunsets on horizons. ‘Worse for Wear‘ carries a couple of lines: “You and I suffered the way that young lovers will” and “All happiness is sad”, both of which take half a dozen listens to emerge out of the thicket, simply because the tone of the song is strangely optimistic and Cabic’s vocals do nothing to convey the feelings his lyrics attempt to emote. This is a genuine criticism if you’re looking for a dramatic, earnest account of the man’s experiences in between this and 2009’s Tight Knit but those accustomed to Vetiver’s releases are unlikely to care. Most will simply be expecting a softening, take-it-easy approach and that’s exactly what The Errant Charm provides.

Full-band efforts do well to act against the general, therapeutic tide: ‘Wonder Why‘ in particular has five times more zest than any of its counterparts and ‘Faint Praise‘ would sit well with a dimly-lit bar scene in ‘Twin Peaks’. As for the rest, you can revel in ‘Can’t You Tell‘’s tip-tap percussion, its subtle density and closer ‘Soft Glass‘ is the closest any of these songs come to resembling a “dark” vibe. But the bulk of the content ties in with the artwork’s watercolours and the rest of Cabic’s back-catalogue. This is road-trip music, essentially: Nothing more, nothing less. And that fact can grate for someone expecting a little bit more. Passion, pace, a single stand-out moment, even; ‘The Errant Charm’ lacks every single one of these.