If hell is inescapable, make for it a seductive face.
So purrs Total Depravity, the 2016 album by The Veils, the blue-black chorus of mad voices singing the ballads of the irredeemable. The album steps down into damnation like a glass lake to dive, retrieve, surface, carve ahead in broad butterfly strokes, and at last float, first face-down and then face-up.
Corruption in All Parts of the Soul
The visions of Total Depravity seep first from its name, which has the poetic bite but also the theological foundation: John Calvin defined this dual-doom—original sin rupturing from God Adam and all us behind him—as “a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all the parts of the soul” earning only wrath.
There is qualified nuance elsewhere in the theology but in the album there is only the anguish and riot of the overcome soul.
Nowhere to look. Nowhere to escape. Nothing to seek. Not for those who can never flee their own warped hearts. I won’t stay another minute and I will not be redeemed, says the song “House of Spirits” in a realization but also a threat.
I try to look away and I fail, answers the title track, “Total Depravity.” There’s total depravity looking staring back at me, I try to look away and I fail.
Where there is nowhere to go, there then must be the beautiful lie of artifice to conceal—to enjoy—the face of hell.
There is the mm-Mm-Mmm-MMMMMMM hum of sleek jazz organ like feathered wings spread against the black to introduce “House of Spirits,” there is the bedrock boom-CRASH adorned in blue hm-HM-hmm on the face of “Low Lays the Devil,” there is the stair-step guitar riff and wavering, two-tone chimes in “A Little Bit on the Side,” there is the RRM-rmmmmm of the electric guitar that rends the River Styx in two for “Swimming with the Crocodiles.” Throughout this netherworld there is the seductive, electrified groove of a starless night, and it hypnotizes. Why else do my vertebrae align against my will to tilt my head in time with the beatings? Why else do my fingers warp—rebel—to tap their colluding knee as it throbs?
Electrified, alive. Mad as the world that moves on, croons “Low Lays the Devil,” high as the heavenly sea, low lays the devil in me.
Electrified, so nearly beautiful in spectral sound. Love guide me out of this harsh, ungrateful land of the damned, sing the female chorus of “Do Your Bones Glow at Night?”, their lone, haunted appearance in the album. Guide me out of this harsh and hateful land of the damned, dance me to forever, to forever, love!
Spectral, electrified, seductive—the craft of Total Depravity nicely conceals the damned dead who are “clambering on the roof and making something out of bone,” as the album admits. Its sirens sing from beyond the grave without bodies, hope, or communion.
There is, coiled in the sensual touch of Total Depravity, lurching cacophony bursting loose to beat down the door with sound and sight.
It springs free first in AXOLOTL as a gusting waver and sharp whistle injecting verve into the ear. I’m glowing bright obsidian, it announces, axolotl, amphibian. Un-elemental chemicals got me growing six black tentacles! The smoky hum of the chorus and the flanking electric guitar obscures the atonal madness.
But like Lucifer it will not be bound. The harsh guitars lashing HERE COME THE DEAD are the whips of its hand, and the gurgling, emitted signals of KING OF CHROME are its phantom heartbeats. Its EDM scales in the former scrape through broken stones to announce the dead, the herald of inescapable riot. The voice of the latter speaks in an echo, and swinging metallic clanks name its windswept landscape, the freeway of haunted souls. Always, it is maddened and alluring and hellish.
The words this insanity dictates make their own infernal poetry: blood and guts on your knees, it begins, the sky is black, the moon is red, here come the dead! A ceaseless fire and an endless rain—it carries, doesn’t it? As it descends in Dante’s wake it carries dead, warm weight in its decaying, mosaic arms.
It's Pandaemonium in here! I prayed for Heaven, but I got this instead, Here come the dead... The end is coming, well just you wait. We prayed for mercy about a minute too late...
The truck driver fleeing KING OF CHROME is the avatar of the album’s madness, its possessed obsession. No thing in Hell or Heaven can match this king of chrome, his anthem warns, he don’t know where he’s going but he ain’t ever going home. He’s riding into the darkness, or perhaps he’s ferrying the contagion of darkness up into the light:
Truck driver, Oh truck driver, Last of the midnight riders, What do you dream in the night all alone? Truck driver, Oh truck driver, First of your kind, now the sole survivor, Where are you heading in the night all alone?
AXOLOTL had warned that Total Depravity was nightmarish and maudlin, and that salvation was more than it can afford. It’s why the sights and sounds of damnation driven to madness sound like disembodied, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, laughter.
A little nightmarish, a little maudlin, good golly go give the kid some laudanum!
There is, beneath it all, utter despair that so nearly includes an elegy.
I thought it might flood, says In the Nightfall, if it only rained a little more. It’s the only song that admits this deepest, coldest layer of desolation. Here is the Beckettian hell below the raucous Calvinist Gothic above—descend far enough, and you’ll find no hellfire and no inferno and no demons and no Devil.
You’ll find nothing, nothing which will last forever. You’ll find the boundless, unmade abyss Total Depravity deserves. It is all the more terrifying.
In the Nightfall keeps the pretense of love by addressing someone with love’s remains. But they are only remains. Darling how long will I have to wait to get you alone, in the nightfall? These are only remains. Oh my love, you know one kiss won’t be enough.
Here, sweetly but without a purpose, are soft, atmospheric sounds. They waver like light through water, like cries within a cave. The heart still hums, and the bass twangs in odd, hanged melancholy. These are only remains.
Futility, then. I try to look away, and I fail.
And in that futility, near-tragedy that feels poignant. In Total Depravity there was never a chance of redemption, but there was a soul at stake. When it is lost at last, when the speaker knows its utter despair, his face shines with the green, underground light of the beatified. In hell sainthood is counterfeit, but it’s still attractive.
Above is heaven, Total Depravity knows. God is present there as He cannot be here below. Despair is the rain that waters stones where grasses will never return, and like an elegy it feels true. It feels beautiful, though it is another artifice.
There are more features in Total Depravity than those I’ve drawn into the phantasmagoria above, of course. I’ve left out the stripped romance of “Iodine and Iron,” along with the trickling undercurrent of the songs’ second-person address to a beloved who’s never quite there (perhaps another ghost, just in the Romantic sense). And I couldn’t get to the name-dropping of L. Ron Hubbard, Steve McQueen, and Pope John Paul II in “Here Come the Dead.” It’s a tremendous album, and so it includes the varied bits and skilled bobs that shouldn’t always fit one another.
I just needed to explore the album’s hellish conceit in a fevered sprint, without journalistic or scholarly concerns. Immersion isn’t always what I seek in my essays, but the effect seemed crucial to imitate while reviewing the hypnotic Total Depravity.
And for what it’s worth, I couldn’t find any comment from The Veils as to choosing their title from the foundations of Calvinistic theology. Press around the album’s release in 2016 focused on their collaboration with the producer El-P and their appearance in 2017’s Twin Peaks: the Return, rather than the abounding imagery stewing in every song.
Only once does frontman Finn Andrews draw near to the album’s aesthetic, when speaking to Offbeat: “But as for the cover art on ‘Total Depravity’—it depends on the perception. I see her as devouring something as opposed to expelling it. You can read into it whatever you wish.”
Thus, I’ll read doomed, seductive, maddened, mournful damnation into the band’s work. And yes, I understand that says plenty about me. People have always told me I’m an incurable, sunny-sighted optimist.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on February 28 with a review of the environmentalist epic Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.
Okay, this post has me all-in for listening. They're playing in my car now as I sit in a supermarket parking lot.