The Veils 'Nux Vomica' album

The Nux Vomica, we learn, is also known as 'The Poison Tree'. It's an evergreen, native to South East Asia. It grows in open habitats, usually attaining a height of about 25 meters. It's a major source of the poisonous strychnine, but also a popular homeopathic remedy for gastric disorders. Its seeds (found inside its green/orange fruit) are also known as poison nuts, semen strychnos, and quaker buttons.

Here are just some of the things it can do: increase the appetite, render more acute the senses of smell, touch, hearing and vision, deepen and quicken the movements of respiration, and slow the heart. It can cause violent convulsions, or act as an antidote to chloroform. I guess much depends on the exact dosage. I guess, in certain contexts, this remedy could kill you.

So when Finn Andrews says, "It's beautiful, but I realise I may have to explain it a lot!", he's fully aware that the title of The Veils' second album is evocative of several conflicting qualities. Hunger, threat, risk, danger. Yet at the same time: balm, comfort, cure, purging. The record covers and conjures up all these heady areas.

"I've had the Latin name in my head for a long time. It seems to have different connotations in different parts of the world. It 's both very modern and yet ancient. It began as a remedy but has been highly corrupted by people - as both poison and cure, its nature utterly confused and warped by human, you know, appetites."

"Nux Vomica " - the triumphant album, not the corrupted tree - is an animal with a huge reach, big ambitions and precise poetic intensity. Both so intimate it 's whispering in your ear, and so epic it stretches across your entire field of vision, it's surely one of 2006's most startling and successful sonic journeys. Here is a young, yearning voice to be reckoned with.

Recorded in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles with producer Nick Launay, then mixed in London by Bill Price, it's the fruition of a period of transition for Andrews' means of making music. (His favourite experience in L.A. was "going out to the Death Valley National park and howling with coyotes - it was either that or just sweating in malls"). The personnel who constituted The Veils for the debut album - "The Runaway Found" , released February 2004 - split up 2 months after the record's release. He returned from London (where he was born, in 1983) to New Zealand (where he'd moved during his teens) and recruited new musicians with the vow, "We must make things as terrifying and exciting as can". The Veils are now: Finn Andrews (vocals, guitar): Sophia Burn (bass, vocals): Liam Gerard (piano, organ) and touring players Henning Dietz (Drums) & Dan Raishbrook (guitar).

"Things got pretty crazy for a while. I went back to New Zealand, got myself back down to the ground, and concentrated on writing again. I feel very much a Londoner, but I 'm from New Zealand, and I seem to write a lot more quickly there. Maybe that' s because there's slightly less to do - there's far less distraction."

In younger days in Auckland, Finn sang at a folk club up a volcano, and sidelined a desire to paint when he began hearing musicians like Tom Waits, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and Bob Dylan - realising that there was more to life than the bleeping Eighties electronica which had drowned his first London foray. By sixteen he was writing songs in both folk and garage bands, and by seventeen was back in England.

"The Runaway Found", variously produced by Matthew Oliver, Ken Nelson and ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, won glowing reviews, ranging from "an intoxicating, hugely promising new find" to " glorious, swooning" and "a stunning new voice". There were justifiable comparisons to Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths, but singles like "More Heat Than Light" and "The Wild Son" roared with atmosphere and a very personal passion.

"It was in parts painfully autobiographical, and very much preoccupied with loss", muses Finn now, in his low-register rumble. "You tend to look at yourself in a slightly more perverse way when you're a teenager than when you' re 22. I feel different now, far more detached from influences. It's more my voice. It's changed a lot - for better or worse, it sounds like me when I hear it now."

"The new band bring something very special to it. I used to feel a stranger in my own band; like they were a unit and I was somewhere else, somewhere uncomfortable. Now there's not as much explaining needed; there's an innate understanding with these musicians. It feels to me like we've made a profoundly modern record - not in terms of "fitting in" with what's around, it just feels like it couldn't have been made any other time - it's just about looking this strange new century in the eye as intensely as we can."

There's a gutteral yet graceful howl from Finn on the showstopping title track, like that of a wounded wolf in a trap, which perhaps most organically articulates the album's dynamism and drama. So many stories, words, tones and ideas punctuate its gradually unfolding landscape as that incomparable voice cries and hollers. "Not Yet" cryptically recognises "it looks an ugly world out there of girl- guides and disease and war - I love my little velvet bed, I never want to leave it any more." There are quests for love, a man "not yet revived and not yet mourned, not quite denied, just not yet born."

The emotional roller coaster of "Calliope!" (named after a street in the bands home town) asks, "What' s there left to believe in?". "Advice For Young Mothers To Be" is "my take on the people I went to school with all suddenly having babies. But it's sung from the mother's perspective so it's a little bizarre". Time spent in L.A. led to "Jesus For The Jugular", though it also came from "going to a very Christian school in my teens. They didn't push it in your face exactly, but it's always a subtext to everything in the West. It affects you without knowing it. I'm frightened that one day I'll find it appealing in some way, that I' ll need it, need something else..."

Again marrying the topical and the timeless, on "A Birthday Present" Andrews sings, " Everybody thinks the end is here - how am I to tell the difference?" Gentler ballads like "Under The Folding Branches" and "House Where We All Live" brilliantly fuse questioning religious imagery, heartbreak and hope - "I' m not sure God knows we're here, most nights It keeps to Itself ..."

The Veils, already very successful in Italy and Holland, aren't part of any "scene", though surely the magic and troubled majesty of Nux Vomica will prove impossible to ignore for Britain and America. " Something within me bucks against the idea of being even remotely fashionable. Everyone's always complaining about the banality of British music these days - and yet if you don't go along with it, things are pretty difficult. It's a Catch 22 that ruins a lot of music.

As his father Barry Andrews was a member of the currently much- mimicked XTC and Shriekback, Finn knows he always has, "someone who's opinion I can trust. He's always the first person I play things to. He's not in London any more, which makes it a little more rare to cross-pollinate than when he was five minutes away, but I genuinely respect the music he made, and admire the way he went about it. You get so many opinions coming at you that it's nice to have at least one rock."

With Nux Vomica, The Veils draw back the curtain, release the foxes, and bring new breath to the genre. "If the first album was about my effect on myself, I suppose this one's more about the world's effect on us all."

It's a killer remedy, which will make the stars in the night sky applaud.

Chris Roberts.

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The Veils - Nux Vomica