Five years have elapsed since Shannon Lay’s last album of original songs, and in the interim, the Los Angeles musician has been studying the proverbial blade. With 2023’s Covers Vol. 1, she sought new terrain in a set of classics that some might consider untouchable: She applied her smoky, whispered-secret timbre to Elliot Smith’s “Angeles” and pulled the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free” from the cosmos to the meadow. She reinvented the classics, and now she’s reinvented her sound, journeying from earthy folk to songs that leapfrog across influences. Past the Veil trades the intimate production and sparse instrumentation of 2021’s Geist for lush, jazzy arrangements that swerve in unexpected directions, alternately vaporous and glitchy but always arresting and immediate, the breath floating out from beneath the gauze.
Lay’s voice is the rope that lassoes Past the Veil, with its menagerie of influences and references, into a sense of cohesion. “Bring us back to reality/Bring us back to love,” she pleads on the smoky, trip-hop opener “Moving.” As the strings quiver like a James Bond crescendo, the song gets stereophonic, like we’re being blasted deeper into the cushions of a conversation pit. Album standout “The Calling” perfectly foregrounds Lay amid a Carpenters piano melody and AM radio harmonies, floating rapturously toward a key change in the back half. “Whom Gods Destroy” features a killer, slightly dissonant flute run. At the record’s close, “I Need More Water”’s disco beat, replete with double-claps, carves modernity into a classic groove as Lay laments hustle culture over a sonic sibling to “The Hustle.” “What if we called it success to sit around in the shade for days?,” she muses over a Billy Preston piano riff.
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Some choices stray a bit too far from the immediacy of Lay’s voice and melodies, and in doing so, the sound gets muddied. The percussive electronics in “Room for Less” are a jarring departure, a stuttering Massive Attack drumbeat that feels slightly at odds with Lay’s loamy alto. On “Sky Song,” the loop and the pedal steel backgrounding her voice feel like so much static—the waves crashing over the siren’s song, a form of misdirection.
Out of context, some of Lay’s lyrics could scan as truisms. “You are more than your worst day,” she sings on “The Calling.” And on “I Need More Water”: “Sunshine, we’ll be alright/This space needs more of us.” Spiritual philosopher Alan Watts is mentioned in Past the Veil’s press release, and Lay imbues these axioms with profundity like only the best teachers can. Is that the power of belief, which comes through in her delivery, or just the way a flute’s trill can sound like exploration and hope? In either case, it’s easy to suspend cynicism when these songs build steadily skyward, arrangements cresting over the kind of timeless melodies Lay has long since mastered. These are songs for night drives, for incense drifting out the window, for moments when you’re tired enough to hallucinate in your peripheral vision—a glimpse beyond the veil of existential drag.
