Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
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.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
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.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
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.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
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.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie