The act of creativity is an inherently fragile endeavour. An extraordinary amount of faith is required during the creation of a piece of art. The effects and consequences of seemingly insignificant choices and decisions are next to impossible to foresee or predict. And so an artist learns to skate the thin line of instinct, trusting their own sense of taste and navigating the contours of their creative impulses. It can be a messy, frustrating and scary endeavour, but it is a process by which art coalesces and solidifies into something concrete, something that exists within and attempts to make some kind of sense of the world around us. The process is the miracle of art.
The Veils frontman Finn Andrews embraced this philosophy in its purest and most crystalline form during the creation of the band’s eight studio album Fragile World. Entering the studio with just the bare bones of a collection of songs and little else, they had no idea what the resulting record would end up sounding like, and only had a few weeks to figure it out. Songs and arrangements were discovered through playing and experimentation, built up with layer upon layer of delicate and considered instrumentation. A deep trust in the power of instinct and spontaneity helped shape the final form of the record and the result is an album rich with poetic imagery and emotional depth.
Recorded live to tape in New Zealand by Paddy Hill and with production by Tom Healy, Fragile World has a beautifully raw and unvarnished warmth to its sound, filled with songs that are at times tender and soulful, at others bracingly direct and immediate.
Coming just over a year after their previous album Asphodels, Fragile World finds Finn Andrews in the mood for something different, “I make each album, generally, as a kind of atonement for the last. Asphodels was so quiet and introspective, I think I just wanted to make something strident and full of life for a goddamn change.” There is a deliberate and striking shift in the overall energy and tone of Fragile World, with a number of tracks on the album hearkening back to an earlier incarnation of The Veils’ sound – echoes of Time Stays, We Go and Sun Dogs flicker through more than a couple of songs.
It is very much a perfect companion piece to Asphodels. Where that album was reflective and often stark, Fragile World feels like a reemergence into a world of possibility, and New Day perfectly epitomises this sense of renewal and optimism – “A new day has come / from the valley on high / they’re dragging up the sun / into the wine dark sky”. Dawn has arrived and with it comes the promise of clouds finally parting. It opens with the gentle tinkling of wind chimes before a tapping percussive beat carries us forward into a bright and upbeat tempo, infused with the inherent promise of a shimmering sunrise.
Every listen of the album results in a new favourite track, though if I was forced to choose I would have to go for My Foolish Heart. The delicate piano and beautifully twangy guitar sprinkled throughout suggest a more country / indie-folk influence, while Andrews’ affected vocals deliver some of the album’s more beautiful lyrics – “You remind me of every lost dream I’ve had along the way”.
The sublime Little White Bird (Fragile World) is another standout. Structured as an increasingly complex series of looping melodies, each layered atop the others, it has a kind of nursery rhyme feel to its construction – an impression reinforced by the simple and repeating lyrics that become almost hypnotic in their mantra-like refrain. The result is a dreamily mesmerising track that echoes the themes of fragility that permeate the entire album.
Lead single Lungs is a rousing callback to early Veils, filled with driving piano, pulsing guitar stabs, and a sense of urgency to the vocal delivery, it calls to mind tracks like Nux Vomica or Pan, and marks the beginning of a more upbeat and energetic rhythm compared to the first couple of songs – Aurora and High Hopes – which carried over some of Asphodels more reflective sensibilities with their delicate beauty and restrained intimacy.
The album finishes with a stunningly affecting rendition of Sinéad O’Connor’s In This Heart. Its haunting sparseness and raw power close out the album on a contemplative and pensive note, leaving us enveloped in a final few seconds of silence as the record drifts towards its end.
Fragile World is a mature record about accepting the myriad nuances of life. It understands that there’s beauty to be found everywhere (even in heartbreak), and that embracing the darkness of life is half the work in discovering such beauty. The world we live in is indeed a fragile one, and the institutions we once believed eternally stable are crumbling around us with increasing frequency. But this album makes an impassioned argument for the value of art and music as the salve against the hollowness of such a unjust world; as an antidote to the crushing emptiness and powerlessness many of us feel in this unprecedented time of global upheaval.
It’s a convincing argument.