reviews / 2009

VEILS - Sun Gangs

Name: VEILS – Sun Gangs
Item: Sun Gangs
Rating: 5.5
Author: Gianni Candellari

2009 (Rough Trade)

pop-rock

by Gianni Candellari

5.5

No dice. Finn Andrews just can't quite get it to come together: with The Veils, he arrives at his third album without having yet found a defined, winning identity for his sound, still dragging along the doubts and flaws found in the previous “Nux Vomica”.

The band is at its best when working as a “unit” and lets itself go with its usual pop-rock; it manages to craft some genuinely lovely tracks, like the opener “Sit Down By The Fire”, an expansive ballad, simple and effective, or the dense, charged art-pop-rock of “Killed By The Boom”.

Also enjoyable are the Killers-style “The Letter”, the gritty quasi-stoner of “Three Sister”, and the torrid psych drift of the eight-plus minutes of “Larkspur”.

The problems arise when Finn wants to carry the weight on his own shoulders, indulging in slow, at times extremely slow, ballads that mostly come off as tedious (“It Hits Deep”) and unconvincing (the old-time pop of “The House She Lived In”), and the frontman's delivery also ends up feeling flat and clinical exactly where it should carry real feeling, as on the title track, just voice and piano, or on “Scarecrow”.

Another half-successful record for The Veils, a band of real (excellent, even?) potential that nonetheless struggles to find the right path and make it its own.

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05/05/2009

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Gianni Candellari, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition