The Veils’ Nux Vomica

It’s brilliant. I stumbled onto The Veils through, of all things, an episode of ABC’s short-lived second attempt at Night Stalker (”The Five People You Meet in Hell”). The only other album of theirs available on iTunes, The Runaway Found, seemed a little uneven at first, but I was wrong. It’s terrific. Nux Vomica is better.

“I don’t want to know the time,
I don’t care about that at all,
nobody knows the way to heaven baby.”

(”Advice for Young Mothers To Be”)

A lot of it is the voice. Finn Andrews does some stuff on this album that should be cheesy or melodramatic, but he’s so genuine and the music is so precisely mixed that it works. He does great things with the sounds of words — halfway between Gordon Gano and Alex Kapranos.

But it’s always weird. A song like “Advice for Young Mothers To Be,” with it’s quasi-’50s style and melancholy message, is a strange mix that I can’t explain and can’t deny. (See the video.)

Plus the whole album is a little pretentious, and you know how I love that. The nux vomica is an Asian pine, also called the Poison Tree. It’s a source of medicines and toxins. It is part curative and part strychnine. Nice.

“Now the wolves all howl
And the birds all sing it:
‘He backed down.’”

(”One Night On Earth”)

This is one of those records where the lyrics and the music sometimes wander far apart, calling to each other through the trees. Other times they meet up on the road and hold hands. Whatever strangeness they’re up to, these songs are greater than the sums of their parts.

“What say you, Lord,
For the olive boys down in the house of corrections
As they try for love and any form of ascension,
Am I on the right train headed in the wrong direction?”

(”Nux Vomica”)

And this is an album with its own through-line themes, all punctuated by inescapable musical hooks. Religion, death, torpor, doubt — plus snow and animals — keep coming back. These aren’t just songs with great hooks, they’re, all together, a long, weird conversation that goes off, comes back, wonders out loud and soaks in its pauses. It feels like an all-night drive through dark, wet scenery.

“Take the scalpel, Miss Ivonne
Time of death is 1 am
The blood is going to my head,
By God, I’ll never touch another’s heart again.
I’ve been brought back to life so many times I don’t know what’s real”

(”Night Thoughts of a Tired Surgeon”)

Good stuff.

Other People Make No Sense

Man, if other people made sense, I’d either be happy or bored. Sitting in the coffee shop, trying to work, but with my headphones left at home, I’m left overhearing a lot of the kinds of people I would turn off if they were on television. These are the people who respond to a friend’s invitation for a night out with, “I can’t go back there; too many memories.” These are the people who sit down casually with a friend, as if they were here to meet them, and shortly after say, “You had a kid? Really? Whose?” Turns out, it’s not someone either gentleman knows particularly well. These are the kinds of people who see a friend of theirs and say, “Heeeey, pretty girl!” in exactly the same way my wife says that to our dog.

These are the people who have nothing else to do than sit around and talk, who actually have enough free time to be bored, who gauge their success as people and the quality of their personal relationships by the degree to which they resemble Grey’s Anatomy. These are the people who, like every character on Grey’s Anatomy, speak only in declarative sentences announcing their own actions and feelings. “I am so mad at her.” “I’m just going to do my nails tonight.” “I think this new shirt I got is totally hip.” “I want to talk about me. I want you to talk about me. I apparently want strangers to listen to me talk about me.”

I am a terrible snob, but at least it breaks up the monotony of self-loathing.