The Veils

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.

"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).

"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.

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 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."