Shannon Lay :: Past The Veil

Made in the gaps of another studio calendar, these songs carry interruption in their grain, moving by recurrence and withdrawal, each session keeping its own time.

Past the Veil was made whenever Altamira Sound in Alhambra happened to be unused. A cancellation. A spare afternoon. Somebody else’s absence from the diary.

Shannon Lay and producer Rob Shelton worked inside those vacancies. The musicians changed. Some songs arrived scarcely dressed. By the end of 2024 the album was finished, then waited again, this time for somewhere to belong. Lay eventually left Sub Pop and founded All The Best to release it herself.

The stop-start method survives in the music. Not as fracture. More like a record that never acquired the habit of asking permission before admitting another instrument.

“Moving” gives the first indication. Bass and Rhodes carry a kind of sober metropolitan melancholy that briefly recalls the quieter Everything But the Girl. The drums barely disturb it. Lay’s singing remains recognisably hers, but the old acoustic proportions have gone slack around it. The song could still be reduced to very little; what interests her now is apparently what happens before anyone bothers to reduce it.

“Whom Gods Destroy” is less accommodating. A drone persists underneath while flute enters with an odd, slightly sour grace. There is no useful crescendo waiting to reward the repetition. The piece simply keeps worrying the same few inches of ground until they cease to feel familiar. Folk survives here almost as muscle memory.

Then “Room for Less” brings in electronics with little ceremony. The beat stutters and repeats. Lay refuses its clipped gait, drawing her phrases across it at another speed. A less confident production would have repaired the disagreement. Shelton leaves it alone. The song limps attractively.

That small refusal to make unlike materials behave is one of the record’s virtues.

“Sky Song” is harder to date. Pedal steel slides behind loops and bright keyboard figures whose cheer has gone slightly stale. For a few seconds there is something of an amusement arcade encountered in daylight, machines still plugged in, their colours suddenly cheap. Then the association slips. The steel bends the harmony just enough to make the brightness suspect.

This album often works that way. Familiar sounds arrive carrying residues from previous lives, though nobody stops to polish their provenance. Soft rock has been here. Jazz too. Psychedelia passes through without incense. Old studio pop leaves a few fingerprints on the piano.

The players do not disappear into a unified house style, and that matters. One afternoon puts a different pressure on a song from the afternoon before it.

“Honest Man” begins to crowd the frame. “The Calling” profits most from the excess. Piano, strings, synths and pedal steel gather around Lay while she keeps the voice almost obstinately level. She does not rise theatrically with the arrangement. The instruments have to do the lifting themselves.

It makes the eventual harmonic turn feel earned rather than announced.

Her singing has always possessed this peculiar refusal of grandiosity. Even when the lyric approaches affirmation, Lay rarely sounds as though she has arrived to deliver wisdom. The words seem more provisional than that, rubbed against use.

This becomes important because Past the Veil contains sentences that could look perilously slight on paper. Water. Light. Kindness. Rest. Change. There is very little verbal camouflage.

Lay does not rescue these words by making them profound. She restores their ordinary weight.

Somewhere underneath the record is her fascination with the ocean and its repudiation of straight-line time. Advance, return, depletion, another advance. The idea suits these songs, although the music is less tidy than any tidal metaphor. “Horizons” extends itself and then seems to reconsider. Other tracks swell, shed an instrument, resume with an altered balance. A section occasionally stays around after conventional songwriting etiquette would have shown it the door.

Good.

There are records that hurry because they are frightened of being caught doing nothing.

This one occasionally does nothing.

“I Need More Water” makes that idleness almost programmatic. Double handclaps and a worn disco gait arrive at the end of an album that has spent much of its time slipping between idioms. There is something faintly comic in the arrangement, which helps. Lay is asking for water, shade, enough time to stop.

No revelation follows.

Drink.

Sit down.

Let the afternoon become useless.

Coming from a record made in days vacated by somebody else, the thought carries more force than a manifesto would. Lay has spoken about the coercion of permanent productivity and about the necessity of pause; here that argument is reduced to physiology. A body gets thirsty. A body tires. Capital has never found either fact especially convenient.

The circumstances surrounding the album begin to matter differently at this point. Altamira Sound was available. Friends came through. Instruments were carried in. Shelton kept the process permeable. When the usual label structure disappeared, Lay eventually made another one herself.

Community, in this case, has screws in it.

It requires keys, calendars, cables, petrol, somebody remembering to bring the flute.

That may explain why Past the Veil never feels especially interested in purity. Its folk inheritance is subjected to bad company: electronic percussion, Rhodes, studio strings, pedal steel, synths, disco, bits of jazz phrasing. Occasionally the fit is awkward. “Room for Less” is better because of it. “Sky Song” almost overfills itself. The record is willing to incur these small failures.

I trust it more for that.

Lay has spent years proving how little she needs to make a song convincing. Past the Veil asks the less decorous question: what happens if she stops being so careful?

The answer is not reinvention. That word is too hygienic.

The songs acquire clutter. Extraneous weather. Second thoughts. Somebody else’s hands. A beat that seems to have entered through the wrong door. A flute with no obligation to be tasteful.

Underneath, the old construction remains remarkably plain.

Perhaps that is why the album can afford its digressions.

A folk song knows how little it needs.

Past the Veil enjoys finding out how much else it can survive.