The riff in “Not in This Life” is so similar to the Big Black song “Kerosene” that I kept expecting Steve Albini to shout the title. I originally got this album because it had a pretty, purple cover. As it turns out, Veil is a solid B-tier shoegaze album that’s worth checking out for enthusiasts of the genre. It’s no Loveless or Souvlaki, or what have you. Still, the “non-canonical” works that are still high quality can be hard to find.

Band of Susans (BoS) is one of those harder-rocking shoegaze bands. They’re relatively close to the more “mainstream” alternative rock bands of their time. This isn’t your chill, lazy shoegaze. The guitars roar and the vocals shout as if attempting to rise above their buried mixing. Nevertheless, Veil has shoegaze’s trademark ocean of distortion and noise. Good stuff, yeah. Too bad BoS underutilize their female vocalist. Always hate it when that happens.

Anyway, a good point of comparison would probably be Nowhere by Ride, as they share similar flirtations with aggression and full-on noise rock. Veil has a decently diverse variety of tempos, structures, and tones in its songwriting, which alone makes it stand above many repetitive contemporaries. This is a bit controversial, but I find Veil to be the greatest of the band’s releases. There’s a sort of charisma to the low-fidelity, essentially amateurish qualities of Band of Susans that elevates the material. In a genre with sonic stylings that almost inherently imply bombast, this group never loses that sense that they’re just a group of young punks fucking around in garages and dives.