Purge Your Heart Out: The Veils’ Sun Gangs

Though The Veils’ Sun Gangs released back on April 7, it took me some time to process and to write my thoughts. I’ve been a Veils fan for quite some time now, absolutely loving their debut, The Runaway Found, and their follow-up, Nux Vomica, so Sun Gangs was in my top five anticipated releases this year. On first listen, I was a little disappointed because the songs weren’t readily memorable or as seemingly powerful as those on their sophomore release, which had broken away from the slower gentleness of their debut. Upon first listen, Sun Gangs somehow wasn’t what I was expecting; after giving it a few more proper listens, I realized it was just as vulnerable, honest and beautiful as Nux Vomica, but that it shed the gritty immediacy and quiet magic and replaced it with a spectrum spanning epic struggle and bittersweet surrender. Son of former XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews, Finn Andrews continues to be one of the most captivating songwriters and vocalists I’ve ever encountered with the ethereal physical beauty to match. His voice, which quavers with a richness that resonates in the pit of your stomach, doesn’t sound like Nick Cave, but evokes the very same spiritual intensity – in both cases, I feel like I’ve been preached at with fire and brimstone and purged of the blackest sins after listening to them sing. I get chills every time Andrews sings lines like “my love,” which he does more often than you would expect. As the cover art suggests, this album examines affairs of a troubled heart in all of their bloody glory while attempting to understand their significance in the grand scheme of the universe, a venue that seems to court chaotic futility despite our efforts to make meaning.

The album kicks off with Sit Down By the Fire, which provides a thrilling feeling of redemptive power despite its world-weary tone; the drums roll like thunder while the driving guitars push forward and gather like banks of clouds. Lyrics like “drunk on the sadness of a universe unmanned,” “complicated beauty of a river run dry,” and “there ain’t no way to get what I want” point to an exhaustion from living amidst a disordered world and a need to just stop and sit down by the primeval comfort of fire. Or perhaps to step back and watch the burning ruin of the Earth’s embers. The style shifts for the title track as plaintive piano takes over, backed by a primordial pulse. As Andrews’ vocals break like the puncturing of a particularly strong artery, he sings “where I am going you can’t save me,” and as the song progresses, he retreats into himself like the last stars fading from the morning sky. The velocity of Sit Down By the Fire returns for The Letter, which pairs a high, clear register like bells with a barrage of rolling drums; they combine to eviscerate you with serrated guitars and pummel you in the chest like grief-addled fists. Andrews’ vocals attain a particularly sensuous quality on this track as he sings of rueful loss and commands “go wash your heart in the river until the water runs clear.” This is followed by one of the tracks that stands out the most, stylistically, Killed By The Boom. It is hugely distorted, messy, and angular while the vocals are wild, desperate and as taut as barbed wire. In a way, Andrews sounds like Jack White at his most unhinged and feral as he recounts a vivid narrative of a hapless character who slips out of his life without reaching any kind of potential and without anything to remember him by:

He stared at the skyline with a look of avarice
he smelled the diesel of a passing train
he fell with both hands still in his pockets
killed by the boom and washed away…

No recognition by the state nor senate
no epitaph to sing aloud his sweet name
no fourteen stations and the nineteenth sonnet
he weren’t no wealthy man but he was a man all the same

The rasping intensity of the song rages against the ultimately useless tragedy and our pitiful expectations of life and death. Reining everything in with a hollow drum and minimal strings, It Hits Deep showcases Andrews’ voice in all its quivering beauty. Electric guitars eventually begin buzzing through the song like dark clouds of wasps while solitude pumps through; this track becomes the sound of coming to terms as a troubled soul sings himself to an everlasting slumber.

The second half of the record smashes into your face with Three Sisters, a narrative worthy of Nick Cave and his eerie Old South tendencies. The fast, explosive syncopation creates a raging inferno of sound as the song’s narrator describes the burning of three sisters by the muddy river side. The ever-present theme of futility and waste comes through with the line “all this for nothing.” Switching direction again, The House She Lived In is a plinking piano, 50s style ballad while Andrews’ crooning carries hints of Rufus Wainwright. It tells the story of the death of an unnamed woman and the loss is made even more tragic in the lines “I know that it was me alone she loved/though I still have nothing to show for it” and “it all went wrong, but I wish you would’ve stayed with me”; the song emulates the helpless stance of watching the wreckage of another. Solemn bass and ride cymbal take over for the hymnal-sounding Scarecrow. The mysterious lines “scarecrow caught in my mind, scarecrow not made for these times” along with the scarecrow imagery create an interesting, complex piece. There’s almost a yearning in this song to be made of straw:

Death cold pecked bare
red collar bled white
no black heart there
no bark and no bite

A straw man cannot live, but nor can he bleed and hurt or struggle with questions of ethics and morality. Then one of my favourite tracks on the album, Larkspur, begins its haunting, harrowing eight and a half minutes. Andrews’ tortured vocals careen over the galloping single acoustic guitar before the bass drum comes in like clouds drawing in or the gathering of a stampede of wild horses. The rising sound envelops the narrator as though his ragged voice is calling from the eye of a tornado; the song swallows him whole as the music comes down, but as he repeats the line “pull his hand from the earth,” he whips the song up into a psychotic, anguished frenzy again. While the narrator fights against unseen demons and repeats “something got a hold on me,” you feel him convulse and lose his grip on himself, passing the reins of his heart strings to someone or something else. Perhaps Andrews is also referencing the poisonous nature of the larkspur plant, which can be read in a common cowboy adage that states ” if you rode the range all day, and were tired of ridin’, eat a fistful of larkspur, and you won’t be tired anymore.” After the turmoil of Larkspur, the final track, Begin Again, feels like a reprieve. Its gentle, melodic piano recalls Advice For Young Mothers To Be from Nux Vomica, and the narrator succumbs to the raging nonsense of the world and learns to love the bitter pain. The last sentiment of the record is “We’re all just following the light of long-dead stars.”

How do we cope with the machinations of a universe we will never hope to understand? Especially when we have brains that convince us we’re more than mere animal, that we should have an immortal soul, or at the very least, a reason for living. And that the organ that pumps our life-giving blood should be the seat of our emotions in an effort to explain our own consciousness. These are the thoughts I have while listening to this album, which indicates that Andrews’ writing is still brilliant and that his delivery is still impeccable. Ultimately, Sun Gangs takes the darkest parts of Nux Vomica and expands upon them; the poison of the strychnine tree is exchanged for the toxicity of the delphinium, or larkspur. Purge your heart out.

The House She Lived In – The Veils

Larkspur – The Veils