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LA Times reviews The Veils live
The LA times has reviewed The Veils live show at Spaceland...
"A singer's fragility is one of the trickier things for a band to make interesting. The Brit-rock canon is full of excellent sad-sack mopers, but just underneath Morrissey or Robert Smith's misery is usually a touch of camp, cocky snarl or starry romanticism that suggests they're going to make it out of the bar OK at the end of the night. You have to find different shades within your black moods and make something new from them.
Finn Andrews, the striking frontman of the Veils, has a streak of lovelorn bleakness as deep as the night is long. At Spaceland on Wednesday night, the U.K.-via-New Zealand quartet did something I'm not sure I'll see again in rock music today -- they really, truly frightened me.
Their set was on a constant knife's edge between Andrews' vibrato-for-days vocals and relentlessly creative guitar playing, and the sense that when he sings a line like "There's a bulls'-blooded fountain in the pit of a moan" (from the fantastic noise blast "Jesus for the Jugular"), he might actually have seen such a thing on the walk from the club parking lot. His Flannery O'Connor-style creepy preacher hat, and an unshaven, alabaster complexion that suggests he lives off a varied diet of scotches, only accented the band's sense of gnawing doom -- though it was leavened with melodic sweetness and a lovely ear for arrangement detail.
Now, I'm a total sucker for this sort of thing. I have no idea if Andrews, after a show, is still a version of his onstage personality, or if he cracks a six-pack with the boys and plays Wii tennis. But as far as his set last night went, it was probably the most moving, unsettling and unexpectedly haunting thing I've seen in rock music this year.
The thing that caught me off-guard about the Veils live is that, on record, they come from a long line of bands up to something similar. They were obviously raised on the good stuff -- the Smiths, Pulp, Scott Walker -- but going into their set, I wasn't sure if there was still blood to be squeezed from those stones. A quick pass through "Nux Vomica" and the recent "Sun Gangs" proves the Veils have obvious debts to bands with big tenors and dense verses. But whatever that weird, implacable thing is in a singer that makes you just have to look at them, Andrews is soaked in it. It takes an otherwise evocative song and makes it terrifying in all the best ways."
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