By Lynn Rapoport

WALKING OVER TO Adobe Books for an art party one Friday night in late March, it struck me that weekends in the Mission have become unfamiliar territory. Cable TV certainly hasn't helped, but nostalgia is a bigger problem. The weekends just aren't what they used to be, but neither, when I think about it, are the weeks. I stay indoors more. The toddler downstairs is rigorously preparing for a career in death metal, and the people above us rearrange the furniture nightly like obsessive-compulsive interior decorators gone off their meds. We still hear the car engines backfiring down Guerrero Street until dawn. We hear the conversations of the ecstatically drunk. Inside the rock clubs, kids put on costumes or take off their clothes; the first laptop gets smashed onstage; angels sing; Tatu comes to town and plays a free show at Amoeba. Someday I'll worry that I missed it all because I grew tired of leaving the house.

Evenings spent at Adobe Books make me ashamed of my habits. Would it be so hard to make more of an effort? Andrew McKinley, the owner, gives some of the only parties I feel like attending these days – drawing in good local bands to perform among the stacks of books during art receptions that are like bohemian hipster family reunions, but far less annoying. On that Friday the remains of Critical Mass rolled by on 16th Street, the smokers spilled out of Adobe onto the sidewalk, where bikes were chained to every available spike in the ground, and a string trio of sorts called Vetiver played pretty songs in the center of the store, surrounded by floor sitters eating cookies, drinking wine, leafing through old books, and looking at the art on the walls, an exhibit addressing the subject of war and peace.

A friend of mine recently referred to Vetiver – singer, songwriter, and guitarist Andy Cabic; cellist Alissa Anderson; violinist Jim Gaylord; and annexed member and roving troubadour Devendra Banhart – as the Adobe house band, which sounds vaguely insulting, if you picture some four-piece performing Steve Miller covers for drinks in the suburbs. Picture instead McKinley, who seems to just want to give the neighborhood a good time every once in a while, whose party guests tend to be loyal in a way that goes beyond free wine and cookies. Or think about Vetiver's inclusion in the Mission Creek Music Festival, which, while skipping any number of stops, travels all over the Mission map, tracing threads of local music and using a geographic element of the city that lies largely forgotten underground but is sorely missed by nostalgics and radical city planners alike.

Vetiver are not sorely missed. Vetiver are everywhere: last month at Bottom of the Hill with Angels of Light and Banhart; scheduled to play the Hemlock with the Sophie Drinker and Sarah Jaffe of Erase Errata the Tuesday we go to press; and slotted for a Mission Creek show at Cafe du Nord the same week they duck into the studio to record an album, their second if you count an eight-song demo I played straight through the rainy season. Even the more rueful songs like "Farther On," which casually laments that "the good times shouldn't be this hard to find," reminded me of sunlight and love stories, though possibly years in the past. There are Vetiver songs in which the light ache of reminiscence comes through as much in the music as it does in the lyrics.

Owing to the aforementioned nightlife problems, I hadn't even seen Vetiver perform when I began to wish they were my house band, based on that demo, recorded about a year and a half ago by Cabic, Anderson, and Banhart (who's headlining the Mission Creek show but not playing with Vetiver). Cabic has a voice that sounds like it's inflected with silver, something that was hard to hear at Adobe through some P.A. trouble and eight separate conversations about Iraq. Generally his vocals sound gorgeous when half-drowning in Anderson and Gaylord's cello and violin lines, weaving through his pretty, fragile fingerpicking and their thicker, plaintive, moody strings on songs like "Arboretum," my favorite.

I'm a sucker for that kind of orchestration, especially live – I even fell hard, I'll admit, for Dirty Three singer-violinist Warren Ellis's lush hyperdramatics – and Vetiver is one of the Mission Creek bands I'm most looking forward to, though the festival program is full of performers that should get me out of the house. The Deletist plays on a bill with Häns Grusel's Kränkenkabinet; a nerve-rackingly diverse lineup at the Eagle offers performances by Waycross, Oxbow, the Vanishing, and the Extra Action Marching Band; an afternoon "pop night" stars the Papercuts and Track Star; and my old neighbor Jonathan Fellman, one of the festival coproducers, plays not one but two reunion shows, one with Chotchke and another with the Wandering Stars. I'm a sentimental girl, and I love reunions because they remind me of the past. So does Vetiver's music, in some way I haven't quite worked out. They dredge up memories I know aren't mine but wouldn't mind hanging on to.