Lifestyle

CHVRCHES – Screen Violence

Note: I started on a general CHVRCHES write up I intended to post first but because I am a slacker, I didn’t finish it yet.

CHVRCHES – Screen Violence Cover

Screen Violence is the fourth full studio album from CHVRCHES, and the first that I’ve gone through a “release cycle” for.  It was preceded by three singles, He Said She Said, How Not to Drown, and Good Girls.  The videos all share a sort of kaleidoscope motif similar to the video for Gun.  I suspect this was done somewhat out of necessity due to COVID and travel restrictions, it helps minimize actual contact between people and reduces cross contamination risks.  Each had a sort of themed color, and all three featured the same rotating doorway.  How Not to Drown is a featured collaboration with Robert Smith of The Cure.

The release cycle has been quite fun, especially while hanging around the CHVRCHES fan discord.  There have been a couple of great live streams from iHeart Radio and Amazon music.  The Amazon show in particular made me even more excited to see them live later this year (assuming COVID doesn’t kill the tour).    A few more songs from the new album would be nice for the regular tour, but honestly I do like the idea of a nice mix of old tracks in there as well, which was what we’ve seen so far.

I didn’t jump on the merch train aside from having a CD on the way.  I’m not super keen on the design of the merch for Screen Violence, I’d be more inclined to buy something Love is Dead or Bones themed.

The whole album is pretty solid, though at this point I’m not sure that it’s their best album, more time is really needed to decide on that, there’s a few tracks that are just more “ok” than great, and overall there’s some good tracks but not too many really amazing tracks that just really stand out on initial impressions.  It’s definitely a darker tone and kind of a less chaotic feel than previous albums, which is nice.  It’s good, I’d recommend it, but I am undecided on if it’s their best album.

The Tracks

Asking For a Friend – I’m really enjoying the sound on this track, a pretty good upbeat feel to it.  I rather like the chaotic sound of the background rhythms.

He Said She Said – Originally my favorite of the three pre-release singles, but Good Girls over took it.  I still like it and I find “Angry Lauren” kind of amusing.

California – This track really fits the same movies theme of Final Girl later on the album.  It’s a pretty good upbeat track that slowly and quietly builds itself up over the course of the run.  It feels like it’s likely going to be very popular.

Violent Delights – At least Martin gets a little bit in this track, since he doesn’t get his own track in Screen Violence.  I’m not sure that I find this track super amazing on initial impression, but it also feels like it could be a track that could easily grow into being a favorite over time.  It has a nice progressive and airy feel that reminds me of other popular tracks like Night Sky or We Sink.

How Not to Drown – Definitely my least favorite of the three pre-album singles.  I think that enjoyment of this track depends entirely on how much people like Robert Smith and the Cure.  Personally, it kind of drags on and halfway through I’m already wishing it were over.

Final Girl – An interesting sound, it feels a lot more like a “traditional band” with the guitar and drums.  It’s got a pretty nice lower tone kind of retro feel to it for sure.  Interesting theme of the lyrics being literally about the “final girl” survivor of horror movies.

Good Girls – The more I listen to this track, the more I really like it.  It’s definitely my favorite of the three singles and possibly my favorite on the album. 

Lullabies – This song reminds me quite a bit of Deliverance with it’s nice and steady and even tones.  It’s not a particularly stand out track but there’s nothing particularly awful about it.

Nightmares – I enjoy the larger sound of this track and the general down tempo fullness, but there’s something that feels off I can’t quite figure out that I’m not really feeling.  Some good synth work going on here though.

Better if You Don’t – A nice light closer, which has become a sort of standard it seems, though it’s not nearly as light as say, Afterglow.  Just a nice guitar backed, light rhythm, track.  I like it.

And just to sort of wrap up here, I figure I’ll throw in my personal ranking of all ten tracks on the album.

  1. Good Girls
  2. Violent Delights
  3. California
  4. He Said She Said
  5. Final Girl
  6. Asking For a Friend
  7. Better If You Don’t
  8. Lullabies
  9. Nightmares
  10. How Not to Drown

Bulk Editing Last.fm for Better Stats

Last.fm Logo

Ok, this isn’t as exciting as you might think. One “social network” I have used for a very long time, possibly longer than any other, and I have used Twitter since 2006 and Facebook since 2007, is Last.fm. I’ve been scrobbling, off and on, since 2005. Only Flickr may rival Last.fm for my length of use and I don’t use Flickr anymore.

One issue that any user of Last.fm regular will be familiar with is the inconsistency of ID tags on music. My current annoyance, which spawned actual action, has to do with CHVRCHES. I’ve listened to CHVRCHES quite a bit on MP3s, I recently bought their discography in HQ FLAC files. the FLACs have the artist as CHVRCHΞS. The stylized E is cool, but it means that they show up in my scrobbles as two different artists. Not great for tracking stats.

Fortunately, I found a neat and useful script that will bulk edit this, so I can quickly and easily change all of the “CHVRCHΞS” into “CHVRCHES”. I also edited my FLAC files so they show “CHVRCHES” as well.

This script requires subscribing to Last.fm pro, which I’ve considered doing anyway, for better stats, and to support a service I have used for a while. Especially since it’s ridiculously cheap to do for a month or two. Plus is means I can go through and clean up some of the other discrepancies in my scrobbles.

I almost wish that subscribing would let me bulk import Scrobbles, because I have a couple of other accounts. The thing is, both of those accounts were just unattended semi-random plays from when I was messing with running a private streaming radio. They sort of represent my library at the time, but they don’t represent my streaming habits. The only real benefit would be that it would bump my total scrobbles by around 30,000 tracks. Which is cool, but it also would destroy my top artist, album and track lists.

These top lists are already a little iffy because there were periods when I was unable to scrobble for various reasons, and there are times when I listen to CDs in my car instead of through my phone, or some other device capable of scrobbling. And while pushing Pink Floyd to the top of the list as my most played artist would be semi accurate for my life of music, it’s not that accurate for the last 15 years. Plus Shiro Sagisu, Death Cab for Cutie and Nobuo Uematsu definitely aren’t top ten on my listening, I couldn’t name any Death Cab for cutie tracks despite 500 “scrobbles” on one of those secondary accounts. (Side note, Nobuo Uematsu, might be up there, plus I saw him live once).

So there are some limits to what could and should be added. As much as I would love to somehow travel in time and collect up all the music I have listened to since the 80s into a perfect representation of my music history, that’s just not possible and the current representation is plenty sufficient for now and going forward.

Organizing Digitally – Backups

Backups are the real key and benefit to digital media. It’s also best to have a multi layered plan for back ups. Specifically, i like the 3-2-1 plan that is often pushed. Three copies, Two different storage devices or media, One copy off site. I would like to add that it’s best if at least one of these is automatic. Ideally, you should have some sort of versioning, in case the backup becomes infected or locked by malware, but that tends to be more costly to do, and it’s kind of overkill unless your data is absolutely mission critical.

Old Backup Methods\

I wanted to touch on some old back up methods I’ve used over the year before going on to my current set up. Many of them were alright, but often had pitfalls. Though I am sure my current system has holes as well, it works well enough, for now.

The classic “oldest” would be CD-Rs. And an extension of this with DVD-Rs. I have not really relied on this method for something like 15-20 years but it’s one of the easiest methods of doing back ups of important data. Burn the data to disc, label the disc, store it away, A plus is that if you date the discs, you can also end up with redundant copies easily, in case one disk is damage or fails. Basic DVDs do have a shelf life, though which is a downside. There are long lasting archival discs available, and I’ve actually considered adding these into my Backup workflow again. I have since pulled all of my old archival DVDs and CDs forward to more modern solutions and sorted the data.

For a while I used a large capacity USB drive. It was something like 500GB, which was huge at the time. Eventually, unfortunately, this drive failed. I had also failed to have a second copy of the data, it was just an archive of data, so, while I managed to recover a lot of the data, I lost some family photos files.

For a while I used Amazon Photos as a backup. This worked fairly well, I get unlimited storage with Amazon Prime for photos. There were still several problems with this method. One, it was unlimited for Photos ONLY, which meant videos absolutely had to be sifted out since other files were limited to a measly 10GB. Eventually support for the automatic part that worked with my NAS was ended as well, so that pretty much killed that as a reliable backup. It also was flaky when deleting files. My wife had sorted out out photos and deleted fuzzy or duplicate images, and many returned and were re-synced from the cloud copies. To get around this I had to disable and disconnect the backup, purge out everything int he cloud, then let it re-sync entirely up after she finished sorting files. Not ideal.

Google photos has similar problems, coupled with Google’s new policy removing unlimited photo back ups. There also isn’t an automatic API based sync on my NAS for Google Photos.

One Drive

After shopping around on several different systems compatible with my NAS, I went ahead and chose One Drive. Specifically, Office 365 Family. I’ve considered subscribing since Office 365 was launched and based on quick rough calculations, for the same cost of something like Amazon EC2 or Glacier or Backblaze, or whatever (I can never keep all these names straight honestly), I decided I could get Office 365 Family instead, which effectively gives me 6TB of storage to work with. O365 Fmily gives 6 accounts 1 TB each. I also have 5 members in my family, all of which use Office to varying degrees (currently using an outdated copy I purchased for cheap through a work program). Except none of them are ever going to really use a lot of that 1TB, so I could easily create connections as needed through the NAS to sync backups to each account.

For now, most of the data sits in two accounts, mine, and a new account created solely for core backups. The fun part is, I could even manually push data up to one of the other accounts occasionally (say, yearly), as a slow backup if I wanted. The Core Backup has all of the Family Photos and Videos and a folder of important documents like taxes and bill statements etc pushed to it. My Onedrive has a copy of my personal document archive and personal photos archive.

The nice bonus is I can now access my documents more easily from anywhere. One Drive sharing also allows me to access the backup drive, using my main account. It also all syncs automatically, even though primary access to these files is all done over network shares. Plus it’s more reliable than Amazon Photos.

I also dumped Dropbox in favor of One Drive, with this new storage available. I had mostly been using Dropbox as a sync for “working files” between my laptop and desktop. Now I just use One Drive.

Flash Drives and Regular Drives

But hey, 3 copies right? More can be better though. I bought a couple of large capacity flash drives that I dump all of the family photos and important files to on an annual basis. These go in the fire safe.

Three Copies, Two (Three) different media types, One off Site.

I also have an external USB adapter for SATA Drives, and a pile of drives in storage. For general “data security”, I basically never throw out old hard drives. When I donate an old PC, I will always strip out the drive and dump it into storage somewhere. These are not always large drives, but they do usually still work. Hard Drives also have a longer shelf life than Flash Drives, so occasionally I will make a sort of “Deep Archive” copy of the data to a spare Hard Drive, that gets wrapped in a static bag and stored away.

The entire point of all this, is basically to avoid ever losing data again, like when my old USB drive crashed. It’s not 100% bulletproof, but it’s good enough that little damage could easily be done. If there were some sort of ransomware attack, I always have the drives backups, even if it got synced to One Drive. If the house burns down, there is always the cloud.