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RECORD REVIEWS

VETIVER: Thing Of The Past [Gnomonsong]

Releasing a covers album when you’ve only got three LPs to your own credit can be a dicey notion. Yet Vetiver doesn’t have much to lose; the San Francisco band is known more for its associations with other artists, having recently backed up Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris. With Thing Of The Past, the members of Vetiver further confirm their rep as record-collector geeks by opening the album with a cover of “Houses” by Canadian psych/folk obscurity Elyse Weinberg, then proceed to dip deep into the songbooks of other ’60s/’70s songwriters such as Garland Jeffreys, Norman Greenbaum and Townes Van Zandt and invite folkie fogies such as Bunyan and Michael Hurley to join them. It’s saying a lot that the most recognizable track here is “The Swimming Song” (written by Loudon Wainwright III for Kate and Anna McGarrigle), and it’s this curatorial taste of the obscure that makes Thing Of The Past more than a romp through campfire favorites you’ve heard a thousand times. It’s all pleasant enough, especially when co-producer Thom Monahan (Banhart, Pernice Brothers) bathes everything in analog tape so that even your mp3 player manages to sound as warm and fuzzy as those old vinyl records. As tasteful as it all is, you still wonder what Vetiver is bringing to this material other than reverence. Not that it matters when Thing Of The Past closes with Bobby Charles’ “I Must Be In A Good Place Now,” a song that, unlike some of the album’s more inconsequential material, deserves the kind of loving resurrection it receives here. [www.gnomonsong.com]

—Michael Barclay