Thing Of The Past covers many different songs from a golden era of American music, folk, country, pop and blues of the 60s and 70s all feature on this album, and indeed throughout Vetiver’s self-penned work. It is easy to scoff and call cover albums vanity projects, but it is as easy to love them for that same reason, you want to hear what the band like and how they are influenced, it’s always interesting, and at best an eye-opening experience.

Opening track ‘Houses’ has the loose feel of much of Vetiver’s work; slight soporific vocals, strummed acoustic, crisp drums and a recording that leaves space between the instruments, bringing a communal feel. However, an electric guitar appears two or three times playing an acid tinged riff that cuts across some of the strolling nature of the song, and the catchy repeated chorus of ‘Just like a circle round the sun’ highlights the previous lyrical imagery of missed opportunity, and so a sombreness is contrasted with the surface of the track. With ‘Hook And Ladder’, (written by Norman Greenbaum who also wrote ‘Spirit In The Sky’), we find the band in an unusually bright mood. Whistling of the main melody, a simple but lovely bass and spritely strummed acoustic guitar, contribute to make it a light and fun sing-a-long, which didn’t seem to be a place that the band were comfortable in on past albums. So often Vetiver songs are filled with contributors filling out the sound with soft accompaniment, but for ‘Lon Chaney’ there seems to be a noticeable lack. Piano, bass and voice are the main parts of the song, but it comes across as austere and somewhat out of character with the rest of Thing Of The Past, Cabic’s rounded, soft and sand-papered voice is not quite suited to the song, perhaps. There are other sad and quiet songs here, such as ‘Road To Ronderlin’, but ‘Lon Chaney’ doesn’t quite keep up the standard. The shining moment of the album is the take on Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘The Swimming Song’, off of his 1973 album Attempted Mustache. The brilliant metaphor and jokiness of the original is set to some very clear instrumentation, a banjo shines brightly playing the uplifting melody, and Cabic does wonders with the vocals, fitting it around the melody and finding nuance that is absent from the original. The album’s closing track ‘I Must Be In A Good Place Now’ is a lulling finish to the album, the vocals have a jazz-informed progression, supplemented by brushes on the drums, and a slowly wandering bass. It actually feels like the band’s second album, To Find Me Gone, if the inky atmosphere and directionless sprawl were better married to the original sound of the group found on their debut, and, in places, on this one too.

It is no surprise that the artists being covered are predominately obscure in nature, take Elyse, author of first track ‘Houses’, who released one album in the late 60s and disappeared until a recent reissue of that album. Or Dia Joyce, who was virtually unknown when she released records in the 60s, let alone now. It all reinforces the crate digging/historian/music lover image of Andy Cabic, he seems to have a real passion for this era which shows in his record collection, (part of which is seen on the album’s cover), and his own music. I am coming at this album from the perspective of knowing only one or two of the original tracks that are covered, so really this feels like a whole new Vetiver album to me, one which is showcasing Cabic’s influences, both past and current. Which is, in some senses, what any album is doing, be it a collection of originals or covers. And as a new Vetiver album it is a success, there are one or two little deviations of style, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but all of the songs are treated with an attention to detail and a loving hand that has the unmistakeable mark of Vetiver. 73%

[Download Vetiver Thing Of The Past]

Links Vetiver [myspace] [official site]