Gary Louris, Vetiver preview

Gary Louris, Vetiver
Metro, Chicago
Friday, March 28, 2008

Jayhawks founder and Golden Smog co-conspirator Gary Louris is always surrounded by so much talent you can never be sure where his begins or ends. It’s also the case on his first(!) solo album, Vagabonds (Rykodisc). Maybe, finally, the tour in its support will set the truth free.

Louris took the Jayhawks’ reins after Mark Olsen split, but when drummer Tim O’Reagan released a solo album in 2006 old questions arose. Even with Vagabonds, let’s see, we have The Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Susanna Hoffs, The Chapin Sisters, and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic and Otto Hauser (whom we presume will pull double duty on Friday) contributing.

Nevertheless, Louris’ distinctly indistinct tenor guides his solo album like a film director you can’t place by name but have seen his work a hundred times (or at least 10). While choir-fed livestock such as the title track simply take up space, Louris has enough country folk in the shed for a couple more harvests. “Black Grass” utilizes rockabilly’s slapback echo to starkly lonely effect while Louris ponders the paving over of America’s fabled golden streets. Intentionally or not, “To Die A Happy Man” builds like a songwriting session: The writer pokes around, nearly dead-ending, before plucking the gentle melody from thin air and never making it more than it needs be.

Cabic’s Vetiver surround themselves with friends from the inside on Thing Of The Past (Gnomonsong), a collection of covers ranging from the obscure (Elyse Weinberg) to, um, Hawkwind. Due to a friendship with anti-folk posterboy Devendra Banhart, it seems Vetiver have been working, not to disavow, but clarify their implied identity. For a fakebook disc, Past backs them up superbly. Though wispy in parts (“Sleep A Million Years”), there are gothic-Americana treasures to be found in Ramblin’ Jack Elliott companion Derroll Adams’ “Roll On Babe,” bitter hippie Biff Rose’s “To Baby,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Standin’,” and Garland Jeffrey’s ode to eponymous movie-monster actor Lon Chaney.

— Steve Forstneger

Click here to download Neighbors’ remix of Vetiver’s “You May Be Blue.”

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly