THE VEILS – SUN GANGS
New Zealand’s The Veils have been through a few line-up changes in their time, but Finn Andrew’s gravelly song-writing has held the show together. Sun Gangs is just as versatile as Nux Vomica in that regard: beautiful piano-based ballads (like the eponymous track and album-closer Begin Again), guitar-based pop-rock songs (Sit Down By The Fire, The Letter), a few high-energy progressive moments (the Liam Finn-esque Killed By The Boom, the almost-country of Three Sisters). Setting it apart from Nux Vomica are a handful of sparse, harrowing guitar-and-voice moments (It Hits Deep, Larkspur, Scarecrow) which bring the darkness to the record. The band has evolved too: whereas before it was easy to think of them as a Bad Seeds-styled backing band for Andrews, here they have come into the best kind of symbiosis, it just works, although it’s hard to say what the magic touch is. Reference points are things like The National’s Boxer or Augie March, and of course Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, but Finn Andrews is the core, and he’s a channeler of Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley among so much else. Another sophisticated offering from The Veils.
***1/2
