Sound Advice: Vandaveer

In late September, if you happened to be strolling around the paying stages at this year’s all-outdoors MidPoint Music Festival on the Cincinnati event’s final day, you might have been lucky enough to catch Vandaveer’s late afternoon set on the WNKU stage. You would have witnessed an exceptionally muscular and diverse Indie Folk quintet equally adept at raucous stage stomping and contemplative balladry, all of it threaded together by vocalist/guitarist Mark Charles Heidinger and vocalist Rose Guerin, who offer up the kind of heartrending harmonies typically associated with people who share a genetic connection. Even as the band’s quieter moments were forced to compete with the more amplified proceedings from the adjoining stage, Vandaveer maintained its composure without missing a beat.

“They’re having fun over there,” Heidinger noted between songs at one point.

Vandaveer’s fairly long history is evidence that the band is no flash in the pan. After a long run with the group These United States, Lexington, Ky. native Heidinger founded and fronted the Apparitions in 2002 and released a pair of albums with the ’60s Sunshine Pop-meets-’90s Indie Rock quintet. When Heidinger moved to Washington D.C. and the band remained in Kentucky, he invented Vandaveer as a solo project under a quasi-band identity, recording and releasing 2007’s Grace and Speed. Although the band dissolved, many of Heindinger’s These United States/Apparitions bandmates have remained with Vandaveer, including pedal-steel player J. Tom Hnatow and atomic drummer Robby Cosenza.

Vandaveer’s gelling ingredient was clearly Rose Guerin, whose ethereal-to-earthy harmonies were attention-grabbing from her first appearance in 2007. Heidinger has often cited Guerin as the sister he never had. Since her arrival, Vandaveer has released three EPs and four full-length albums, including 2016’s masterpiece The Wild Mercury, which sounds like an unlikely collaboration between Train, David Gray and Richard and Linda Thompson. Vandaveer’s latest EP, Love is Melancholy, features a more appropriately moody arrangement of the title song, which received a jauntier treatment on The Wild Mercury, plus two brand new tracks.