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CHVRCHES @ The Pageant feat Donna Missal (12/06/2021)

Back in 2019 after going to see Sigrid live, I decided I really wanted to go to more concerts. I even started planning to maybe try to go to Lollapalooza at some point. Then well, the world fell apart, and there were no concerts really for a while. Things are still kind of falling apart but they are better for people making an effort to make them better (though that’s a subject for another post). I did manage to make it to another concert. I even have one, maybe more lined up for 2022 already. This time it was CHVRCHES. It’s just pronounced “Sheevurches” so don’t over think it. No wait, it’s just “Churches”.

Funny enough, Last.fm suggests I started really listening to CHVRCHES a bit after going to see Sigrid, though I also started really trying harder with tracking music on Last.fm around that time as well. I am pretty really sure I have listened to at least some of their music before 2019. I’ve been listening to them pretty heavily for the past few years, spoilers for my end of year music wrap up, but they were my number one most listened to artist this year. Though they are still number 4 over all.

CHVRCHES at The Pageant

This show was once again in St. Louis, this time at The Pageant, a nice music hall a little north of Forrest Park off of Delmar Blvd. The supporting act was Donna Missal, whom I had not heard before. Before the show I had a pretty tasty chicken sandwich down the block at Chicken Out. I forsake my “Ramen Junkie” moniker this round a bit because the chicken seemed faster and I just wasn’t in the mood for noodles, despite that there is a Ramen Noodle restaurant just next door to the Pageant. Maybe next time.

I got tot he venue around an hour and a half early, I really wanted to get down up front like I had with Sigrid, though the light show of CHVRCHES is probably pretty good even from a distance. I managed to end up on the bar next to the stage again, down on the right side.

The show itself was really great. I enjoyed Donna Missal quite a bit and was kind of disappointed that I could not find her merch stand, despite her mentioning it, I had kind of wanted to pick up a CD if they had any. I did go ahead and get a digital copy of her newer album later. She had some pretty amusing moments with her guitarist, who, in her words, is her “crush” though “sadly, she is married… to a man…” Her setlist was 10 songs line, 9 original and one cover.

  • How Does It Feel
  • Jupiter
  • Skin
  • Butterfly
  • Insecure
  • Sex is Good
  • (To Me) Your Face is Love
  • Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead Cover)
  • Best Friend
  • Let You Let Me
  • Donna Missal
  • Donna Missal

After a brief break was the main event with CHVRCHES. What a great show. Tons of amazing lighting effects, a solid performance, despite Lauren apparently having a cold. Not quite as much back and forth banter between the three as I would have liked and have seen in some of the other concert videos, but still a bit of fun bits in between tracks. I almost wonder if some of those break moments where they would chat were sacrificed for Lauren’s many costume changes. She came out in one outfit, and shed the jacket she was wearing after the first track, changed later into a second outfit, then later into a third, which was modified for the encore songs. So essentially 5 different “outfits”, though she doesn’t leave the stage to shed her jacket.

The show was also really good from an acoustics perspective. The audio engineers definitely deserve some credit for good mixing and balancing on things. It wasn’t overpoweringly loud like the Sigrid show had been. Though I did have a set of concert ear plugs this time, something I’d recommend honestly. Proper concert ear plugs are designed to slightly dampen the sound without making if muffled or too quiet. I really did not notice anything missing.

Anyway, CHVRCHES setlist was 17 tracks long, with the majority of the tracks being off of Screen Violence, which isn’t surprising. I also managed to get much better photos and video than when I saw Sigrid.

  • He Said She Said
  • Forever
  • Leave a Trace
  • California
  • How Not to Drown
  • Violent Delights
  • Science/Visions
  • Good Girls
  • Bury It
  • Miracle
  • Night Sky
  • Final Girl
  • Recover
  • Never Say Die
  • Asking For a Friend (Encore)
  • The Mother We Share (Encore)
  • Clearest Blue (Encore)

I particularly enjoyed Violent Delights, which is relentlessly aggressive live, the chaotic build of Science/Visions, Night Sky which is always great, and the massive build up of Never Say Die. Then of course Clearest Blue was a perfect closer track. However all of the tracks were excellent.

The encore itself was particularly special. In keeping with the “Horror” surface level theme of Screen Violence, Lauren comes back on stage covered in fake blood for the final three songs, still wearing her “Final Girl” T-shirt from the last costume change.

  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant
  • CHVRCHES at The Pageant

Organizing Digitally – Photos

On the surface, it seems a little goofy to separate Photos from Videos, but the reality is, both of these formats really deserve separate handling. For one, when backing up Photos, a lot of solutions will give you unlimited photo storage, but not unlimited video storage. Which makes automatic backup tricky.

Video is also rather massive compared to photos, from a file size perspective. A side effect of this is that having videos mixed with photos can dramatically increase load times when browsing photos later, since it takes more for the file system to chug through a video for thumbnails etc.

I have effectively two sorting systems for photos, depending on what the photos are. Also, unlike the videos, my wife does a lot of the actual sorting of Photos, at least the family photos, since she uses them for scrapbooks and such.

Family Photos

Similar to videos, I sort family photos by year, in one large blob. The difference is, I also sort them into folders by “event”. For example, there might be a folder, “2019.12.25 – Christmas at Home”. The extra details are helpful, because there might also be, “2019.12.23 – Christmas at Josh’s Parents” and “2019.12.26 – Christmas at Tina’s Parents”. (NOTE: I use the actual names of our parents). One minor mistake I made early on when I was doing all the sorting, was labeling them things like “Christmas at My Parents”. I changed all of those to be my parent’s names. I might also use “Christmas at Home with Josh’s Family”.

These folder names allow for easy sorting by date, and it allows a quick, at a glance description of who might be in the photos. I have tried several different Photo Organizing software solutions, and frankly, nothing beats just using the straight file system folders. The nice thing is a lot of software solutions will use the Folders as a way or sorting, so using these folders means the photos can easily and quickly be imported.

Each year also may have some more generic folders. These are catch all folders such as “2018 Cat Photos” or “2012 Kids School Artwork”. There might also be folders like “2014 Misc”, which is where less eventful photos might go. This would be things like, 1-2 lone photos at a local fair event, or single photos of weather or something at the house. They don’t deserve an entire folder, but they are still in the correct year.

Other Photos

I labeled this as “other photos” but it’s mostly just my photos. I take a lot of random photos of my toys and electronics projects, and random crap that is mostly unimportant. I keep these photos separate from the Family Photos, mostly because it’s just clutter my wife doesn’t care about, but because they are just different in their core nature.

These are sorted instead by type. For example, I might have folders for “Toys” then inside, “Transformers”, “Marvel”, “Imports”, “LEGO”, etc. Within those folders, I often will break it down further by lines, or individual figures, since I (used to) take little galleries for use in reviews. Other folders are broken down the same way, photos of projects, photos of electronics, photos of random scenery, sorted down and categorized.

We also use a similar set up for eBay photos, though I don’t really take any of those. I have a shared folder JUST for eBay photos, so my wife and daughters can keep everything sorted and together for the work they do selling on eBay and other online store fronts.

Not Photos

I do something similar with images that aren’t photos as well, though I don’t later back any of these up. Because I am a digital pack rat, I save a ton of random memes and images from the internet. I have a monthly reminder to clean my phone off. These files all dump onto my laptop in a folder named for the year and month, then these images are manually sorted down based on what they are. I’ve honestly gotten better about not just saving piles or random images lately.

Regular Consolidation

Speaking of the Monthly reminders, this system works best if it’s kept up regularly. I have a monthly reminder to offload my phone files, but this only works if I actually DO the sorting, which I make a point of doing.

We have also started regularly dumping everyone’s phones once a month. Though not necessarily removing the files, that’s up to everyone individually, everyone in my house is an adult at this point. But we still consolidate photos as needed for events or activities, since it’s not uncommon for say, my daughter to be taking photos at Christmas, that my wife may want to use in a scrapbook.

Old Photos

I have not gotten as far as I’d like in this project, but I have also started work scanning and archiving older printed photographs. It’s nice to have these digitized since it means they can be archived and backed up and even reproduced for scrapbook albums or whatever. My wife has made scrapbooks for each of our three kids, generally for each year (sometimes two) and so she often uses multiple copies of the same photograph.

Consolidation

The other good part of having everything together is it makes it way easier to keep backed up. I plan to do an entire separate post on the overall backup process, but having things consolidated, makes it way easier to manage and ensure everything is being captured and saved.

Sigrid @ The Ready Room feat Raffaella (10/08/2019)

I don’t go to a lot of concerts, and of the 7 total I’ve been to of any merit, 4 of them weren’t really anything I would have necesarilly chosen. Three of them were country music that my wife and daughter wanted to see (Toby Kieth & Kip Moore, Lee Brice, Travis Tritt). Though the shows were enjoyable, country music isn’t my first choice in music genre. The main issue honestly is most of the artists I would want to see tend to be at huge venues and cost a few hundred dollars a ticket, so it’s just not really affordable.

So when I was watching some Sigrid on Youtube and there was a little notice below about a show “nearby” in St Louis, I figured, why not let’s see what’s up. It turns out, it was super affordable, and it’s close enough that I could always drive there and back in one round trip, even if it meant a late night. I asked my wife if she wanted to go, and mentioned that it was cheap enough that even if she ended up not being able to, because of her various come and go health issues, the extra ticket wouldn’t be a huge bust or anything. Fortunately, she came along as well.

We opted to make a little mini vacation of it, and I took a couple of days off work. I joked that we were having a Scandinavian vacation, since we went to IKEA (Sweedish-ish) during the day before seeing Sigrid, who is Norwegian, that evening. The day after we also went to the St Louis Zoo.

The show itself was at a little club called The Ready Room. I couldn’t find a ton about the place online before the show so I wasn’t super sure what to expect. It wasn’t a particularly large venue, and the maximum capacity listed was 750 people, so at the very least, it was going to be a fairly small crowd. We arrived around an hour early, plenty of parking available ont he street too which was nice. The excitement of the show kind of got ramped up here as we walked past the tour bus parked on the side of the building. There were a dozen or so people lined up outside, so we walked next door to a sort of open space pizza spot called Pie Guy Pizza for a quick bite to eat.

Doors opened shortly after we had arrived, and the line hadn’t grown much, if any, so we headed on in. The stage area was a mostly black room, but it was also much wider than it was deep, so there was a lot of width to the stage. I ended up standing right up front next to the rail, though off to one side. After a bit more wait, it was time for the show.

So, in addition to Sigrid, there was also an opening act, Raffaella, as part of the show. I’d never heard anything from Raffaella, so in the weeks leading up to the show, I added some of her tracks to my Amazon playlist. Probably my favorite song of the half dozen songs she has out is Balaclava, though in general, I rather enjoy all of her tracks.

I didn’t take any video of Raffaella, so you’ll have to settle for this iteration from Youtube. Funny enough, I had listened to this track enough that I was able to sing along for quite a bit of it during the performance. Her show was decent as well, though due to the wide nature of the stage, it felt a little crowded, since her band was set up in front of Sigrid’s Band’s gear.

Unfortunately, I only ended up with one sort of OK photo from Raffaella’s set. I wasn’t super satisfied with a lot of my photos from this event. My camera’s phone sucks, and I had inquired before hand about the camera policy of the club and got a sort of boiler plate reply that suggested I would not be able to bring my DSLR to the show. I had brought my daughter’s fixed lens midrange Nikon, but in the end, left it int he car, because I didn’t want to deal with if I would be allowed to bring it in or not.

After Raffaella’s set, there was a short intermission while the crew broke down the extra instruments and cleaned up the stage before the main act. I’ve watched a lot of videos of Sigrid’s Sucker Punch tour, so I had a pretty good idea of how the set would go. But still, it was quite exciting to actually be there as Peder, Kristina, Sondre and Kasper came out in the dark to take positions on stage. Then the familiar sort of ambient build up to the opening of Sucker Punch as Sigrid rushes out and starts singing the song.

I just want to say, it’s really something else to go see an artist that you really like, and get to be “right there”. Later, after the show, I commented to my wife that the whole thing made me really want to go see more live shows, but I’m spoiled now because I’ll probably never end up with this perfect combo again.

Having listened to all of these tracks really helped the whole experience as well, there’s something really fun about a crowd of people all singing along with each other all just in the moment. Sigrid puts on a really great show as well. She is constantly moving and dancing around the stage. She makes little call outs to the crowd. Possibly the best one, at one point she jumped out onto the platform on the backside of the railing in front of the stage and someone int he audience totally lost it. Sigrid commented that she “Didn’t expect you to scream like that.”

The band is great too, and sometimes I feel like they don’t get enough credit. Kasper does some great drum riffs, I particularly love him in the track Go to War. Sondre does some pretty good guitar work on the few times he gets to do his small moments to shine. I’m less familiar with Peder, as he is new to the group after some sort of unknown drama involving the old keyboardist. I also really like Kristina as Sigrid’s backup vocals. I’ve been listening to her album “Revet vekk” some recently. It’s all in Norwegian and has a way different vibe than Sigrid, but I find it pretty relaxing to listen to.

Anyway, I also really enjoy how every track sort of feels different. Some of them are heavy bouncy fast paced songs. Then you get more relaxed moments like in Dynamite, where Sigrid plays solo on the Keyboard, or Level Up where it was just Sigrid, Kristina, and Sondre.

My only complaint, which personally, isn’t a huge one, and I have no idea what the actual “blame” would be for it. Holy shit the show was loud. Like, literally, overwhelmingly loud at times. There were many times when I could basically only hear drums. There was a moment, probably during the heavy drum beats of Go to War, that I had resigned myself that I’d possibly be deaf after the show was over. I don’t know if the sound was cranked up too much, or I just wasn’t expecting it, or (most likely) I was standing 2 feet in front of one of the speakers, but it was LOUD. It was a good thing I was already pretty familiar with the music. Also, I suspect it was where I was standing, because my wife, who was standing behind/beside me, just off tot he side of the speaker, didn’t really mention having the same problem, even when I mentioned it.

Whatever the case, I would definitely go to another Sigrid Show, and I definitely want to go to more concerts in the future, though I may try to stick to smaller venues like this one, even if it’s not a band I am super familiar with. I’m going to wrap up here with the one video I did take, of my favorite Sigrid track, Basic.