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CHVRCHES – Screen Violence

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CHVRCHES – Screen Violence Cover

Released – 2021.08.27

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.

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
Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for 2020

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Yeah, those monthly updates were kind of bleh, so I dumped them. But I still want to do a yearly wrap up. Though overall there isn’t a lot that’s surprising to me about the yearly stats.

The year was dominated by most of the artists I would expect it to be dominated by. Sigrid, Tessa Violet, Aurora, CHVRCHES have 14 of my top 25 albums. This grid doesn’t even include a few additional Sigrid “Albums” of live tracks that don’t properly show up so they get filtered.

Anyway, a bit better breakdown…

I am actually surprised that Sigrid still topped the chart above Aurora. I’ve been listening to a TON of Aurora, and not just “recently” or something, like all year. Plus Sigrid hasn’t had anything new since November 2019, so I felt like I had been listening to her music less. I still had around 100 more scribbles on Sigrid than Aurora. Tessa Violet, I’m less surprised about. I’ll comment a bit more later, but Tessa Violet has kind of dominated my individual song listens, she just… has less songs.

CHVRCHES has been kind of slowly building up more and more in rotation, and I expect them to continue to come in pretty high going forward as well. Another sleeper to look out for next year will be Dodie, at number 13. She only has a handful of tracks, and I’ve only recently started listening to her, but I really like her music, and next year, she has her first full album coming out.

On the “falling” list, I’ve hardly been listening to Alice Merton and Kiesza lately. Nothing wrong with either, they just sort of, have fallen off the rotation. And despite both ranking high, Dua Lipa and Carly Rae Jepsen were never really in the rotation. I’m honestly not sure how either is so high.

There are also a few of my more mainstay artists making a showing. The Who, BT, Pink Floyd, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morrisette, Taylor Swift. I’m a little sad that Raffaella only really had one new song recently. She was the opening act for Sigrid when I saw them in 2019 and I really like her music. She has put out one track, Bardot, and a collaboration track called On the Look Out, that may as well just be a Raffaella track.

My single top track for the year, is, without question, the “2020 Anthem” of Bored.

Granted, this track is older than 2020, but it got a music video in 2020, and it kind of just sort of… fits the feel.

Half of my top ten were Tessa Violet tracks, so like I said, she kind of dominated on an individual track list. Everything else is about as expected, though I would have thought more Aurora tracks would have made the cut for that top 20.

Anyway, if you want, you can always just follow me on Last.fm.

Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for April 2020

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Well, it finally happened.

After a very long, very strong, 9 month reign as Queen, Sigrid has been dethroned from my top artist for the month. And by a rather huge margin. Funny enough, she has been dethroned by someone she knows, who is also a Norwegian singer, AURORA. It was a one-two punch though, because Sigrid has dropped to number three, not number two, with Tessa Violet sliding in at number two.

I can’t honestly blame the VierLive show entirely for Aurora’s rise here, she has been on sort of a slow bubble for a while now in my listening patterns. It certainly likely helped things along however. I would point to Tessa Violet and say she wasn’t helped by any live shows, but well, that wouldn’t be true. I have not watched all of them but she has been doing two weekly Youtube shows on Youtube. Though those are quite a bit … less structured.

Moving on a bit, Dua Lipa had a new album drop, Future Nostalgia, which is has a pretty nice sort of old school syth-pop feel going on with it. BT has been getting a bit of a resurgence lately, though it’s mostly just listening to These Humble/Hopeful/Whatever Machines again a bit. I can never remember which is which on those albums.

The rest of the top ten isn’t anything particularly exciting or new. The 5×5 is kind of all over the place as well, since I’ve been listening to a lot of random techno music lately so there’s a lot of kooky random stuff on there. The weird thing is, I don’t thing BT is on it either at all, despite being number 4 for the month.

Here is the 5×5 though, for the sake of consistency.

Live Shows

Vi Er Live – Sigrid and Aurora (Somewhere Else, 2020)

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Last year when I went to see Sigrid in St. Louis, I told my wife afterwards that I wanted to go to more concerts. That plan clearly isn’t going to pan out to anything with everything going on. What I have done though is watched quite a few virtual concerts. The Somewhere Else Festival (Et Helt Annet Sted) presented at ViErLive.no is actually the fourth live show I’ve watched from Sigrid int he past month. The previous being a bit on the Twitch Steam Aid event, a short show on the IGTV from Levis, and one for the opening of an exhibit in KHÅK Kunsthall, on Facebook.

The Somewhere Else show is the first one that’s had any real production behind it, and it’s the first that had the entire bad. The first two were Sigrid playing Piano alone in her parent’s house, the KHÅK Kunsthall show was Sigrid alone playing piano in the museum. The Vierlive show is also different in that it was a paid event. You could buy a festival pass for 500nok (~$50 USD) or individual shows for 100nok (~$10). Super affordable. Most of the shows also included a VOD replay, though sadly (irritatingly), neither the Sigrid nor the Aurora shows have a replay option. I really hope there is some planned release of these shows as both were really stellar.

Despite not actually being live with Sigrid in person, the virtual show was really enjoyable and well done. For one, I am pretty sure it was all one camera shot (the Aurora show had a couple of cuts to alternate cameras). The sound quality was top notch incredible. Most of he songs had a much different tone and feel from normal as well, which really spiced things up a lot.

The show opened with Sigrid chatting in the chat room before going into Level Up on the couch, then moving to Basic in the room, both songs with only Kristina on backup vocals and Sondre on guitar. Then we follow Sigrid alone up to the main stage where the rest of the band (Kasper, drums and Peder, keyboard) were waiting playing a lead in riff before Sucker Punch. One one point they all went and say in the theater seats to play a nice acoustic Plot Twist. We also got a couple of piano tracks (on a nice grand piano and not the usual keyboard) of Dynamite and Home to You. Probably my favorite part was the rock and roll intro for I Don’t Feel Like Crying, with Sondre going all out on the guitar.

I also really liked how each song (11 total) had it’s own feel and set up for how it was presented. Only Dynamite and Home to You were similar, and that’s mostly just because it was Sigrid doing vocals and piano solo, so there isn’t a lot to mix up there.

Of course, being a virtual concert, it’s kind of hard to take photos, so here’s some screen shots instead.

I kind of was worried that these shows were going to be pretty basic, more Sigrid at her Parent’s Piano doing 3 songs, or some sort of funky out of sync Skype conference between the band members. The name is Sigrid, but frankly, I like Sigrid with her band more than I do just Sigrid. They all just mesh so well together. Part of what I really liked about this show was that on some level it amounts to a Studio Quality performance by the band. I am pretty sure a lot of Sigrid’s tracks on the album, don’t involve the band, but more synth. Not all of them, but most of them. I could be totally wrong. I like the live concert videos more than the regular tracks, but you often end up with dodgy audio on concert videos. This show is the best of both, and it was so well produced.

After how impressive the Sigrid Show was, I opted for also watching the Aurora show. I know a lot less about Aurora’s music than Sigrid, but I do like the tracks I’ve been listening to. And I’ve been listening to more and more of them over time. Aurora is arguably more popular than Sigrid though, I mean, she was part of a major Disney Movie (Frozen 2) so that alone kind of pushes her higher.

The point is more, I had less idea of what I was going to be seeing with Aurora. I was a bit disappointed initially, the first three tracks were Aurora singing and dancing in front of the white curtain (below). While it was good, I was a bit disappointed that there was less overall change of scenery between tracks like with Sigrid. A few tracks in that changed.

I can’t tell you all of the songs in this set, but around A Different Kind of Human, she started to move off the stage and a lot more visual effects started to kick in. Unlike Sigrid’s show, Aurora’s band (not sure if it’s her band or a band), was behind the scenes and off camera until the end of the show. There was a real band though. You could see their shadows behind the white curtain and like I mentioned, they showed up at the end for a brief introduction.

The biggest stand out of the performance from Aurora was the level of energy and raw emotion she puts into her music, Especially as the show reached it’s climax with Running with the Wolves. It’s also a crazy level of contrast with when she speaks and her overall small stature. The few times she talks to the camera it’s extremely soft and timid, she almost seems kind of afraid of it. But when performing, she’s something else entirely. She is the Queen of Warriors & Weirdos after all.

Overall the whole experience was well worth it for both shows. The main issue I had was less with Vierlive and more than neither show had a replay option, at the request of the music label. Maybe its something they plan to release later again in some form, but it really feels like kind of a waste of creative effort. Most of the other shows had a VOD option, tough a few others are also now unavailable. There also was a bit of a lack of communication by Vierlive until the last minute if shows would even have VOD options. It feels like there should at least be a 24 hour period or something, most of the shows didn’t happen at a time I could easily watch due to work, and other people mentioned having bandwidth issues. It just seems like it would have been the polite thing to do, even limited, this was a paid event after all.

Listening Habits

My Music Listening Habits for March 2020

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So, not a particularly exciting month in Music. Despite actual effort on my part, Sigrid still tops the chart by a large margin. Tessa Violet comes in second. I actually watched both of these artists doing online live(ish) shows due to the Corona-virus. Though the Sigrid segment of the Twitch Stream event was pre recorded and not actually live. Tessa Violet has been doing some live shows on Youtube.

The soundtracks for Gris and Journey both make a return. They are both pretty similar in feel and are really great for “general distraction free listening”. Lindsey Sterling also falls into this category really.

In newer releases, Dua Lipa has released the full Future Nostalgia album and it’s pretty good. Good enough to already make it up into this monthly list. I’ve also been trying to give Taylor Swift’s Lover another go, though it just isn’t doing it for me.

Lastly, and kind of out of left field is the Gin Blossoms. The Gin Blossoms are performing in town in a few months and I was listening to them as a bit of a refresher to help decide if I wanted to try to get tickets. At this point, with all the COVID mess, the show will probably get cancelled anyway, but I opted for no, for now. I do enjoy Gin Blossoms, but at the moment, not enough to go to a show.

In general my music listening is down a bit as I’ve been listening to more Podcasts again. Mostly This Week in Tech, Windows Weekly, and WTF@TFW which finally started putting out episodes again.

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