Chvrches The Bones Of What You B
Jette Beyerlein
For two decades, Glasgow's indie-pop and dance music scenes have run in parallel, with only a few notable intersections; Chvrches are the latest meeting point. The Scottish trio's debut LP, The Bones of What You Believe, is a seamless fusion of emotive theatrics, hook-loaded songwriting, and some of the more forward-thinking sonics in electronic music right now. It's a style that feels very of-the-moment: Chvrches embody what a generation raised on electronic music is looking for in a rock band, taking the danceable textures favored by the Electric Daisy set and applying them to the sweeping songcraft of M83 and Passion Pit.
Chvrches hail from Scotland. A country that has a strong local indie scene, but rests its laurels on the shoulders of bands like Franz Ferdinand and Belle & Sebastian on a global scale. One could say that there aren't THAT many significant Scottish bands at the top of the music biz. I don't normally base too many of my conclusions from Pitchfork reviews and I certainly don't mention them in my posts, but I HAVE to break my fast just this once. Because Larry Fitzmaurice painted a picture of a band who had a Scottish indie brain-trust of sorts seeing them through to stardom on this album. It helped me to understand why Mayberry could've been nervous that night in March, their first playing in the US. Could it be that there is a weight on their shoulders of NATIONAL proportions? It makes me think about this band's role in respective music scenes and what this album's success truly represents
Enough talk. Take a song like "Gun," their third single off the album. It opens with stunning effects and Iain Cook's electrifying bass guitar that strums throughout the song. Martin Doherty's loops are so intricate and our muse opens with:
"When we did sit down to do something in my studio, it became very clear very quickly that there was a unique energy to the ideas that were emerging. Right around that time I was producing an E.P. with Blue Sky Archives - which is Lauren's other band - and had let Martin hear something we were working on. He was immediately taken by her voice so we coaxed her down to the studio with a trail of peanut M&Ms and gently persuaded her to sing backing vocals on a couple of our demos. Almost instantaneously we realised that her voice fit beautifully with what we were doing. So pretty soon we decided to move forward and begun writing together."
Tell us about how you play live, talk about the kit on stage and who does what.
"At the moment we have three analogue synths on the stage: Moog Voyager, DSI Prophet 08 and a Juno 106. They are all set up in one bank which I play but there's a midi controller keyboard across the other side of the stage thatMartin and Lauren plays. We use Ableton Live to control our in-ear monitor mixes, for routing midi and processing synth effects. Martin also plays a Native Instruments Machine for triggering vocal and drum samples. I also play a bit o fbass guitar and guitar which all go through Ableton Live."
Meeting people after shows, "I'm a total crier," says frontwoman Lauren Mayberry, 27. "When they're emotional and telling you what a song meant to them, it just makes you think about bands that are that for you. It's really surreal to be that person for someone, it's an incredible privilege. I don't know how long we'll get to do that for, so I try to remind myself of these things."
"I can hear that this time when I listen to it, it's more of a record," Mayberry says. "Other than that, the approach was pretty similar. At this point, we know a lot better what the band is and what we want it to be, and we wouldn't have had that without having been on the road for so long."
The first song recorded was the glimmering Never Ending Circles, but it was the teetering, stadium-ready Clearest Blue midway through the writing process that "kind of epitomized what we were trying to do," Mayberry says. While Bones took a cue from the synth-fueled hooks of Depeche Mode and Eurythmics, Martin and Doherty looked to Quincy Jones' minimal production on '80s classics such as Michael Jackson's Billie Jean this go-around. "They were keen to see how many elements you can take away and if it's better for the song," Mayberry says.
On the day of its release, a thread sprung up on online forum 4chan about Mayberry's appearance in the video: a short, black dress in some shots; wet hair in others. A slew of online commenters called her a "slut" and "whore," and debated whether they'd have sex with her. Mayberry linked to the since-deleted thread in a tweet, writing, "Dear anyone who thinks misogyny isn't real. It is and this is what it looks like."
If this performance sounds like something that will play even better at Coachella than it did at the Paramount, that's because it is. (Indubitably, Chvrches will be at every major festival in the world on this tour and they will conquer every last one of them.) Grantland's Andy Greenwald recently told Mayberry he describes their music as "emo with synths", to which she agreed. They've been dressed up with brooding post-rock atomspheres and jagged, post-Silent Shout arrangements, but Chvrches' songs have always been big emotional statements backed up by unabashed pop melodies, and Every Open Eye moves them even farther into that world. And their current tour captures the harder/faster/better/strong mentality Every Open Eye was built on: by tightening the few loose screws in their machine, Chvrches have fully graduated to the cathedral-sized stature their music has always aimed for. "You know, Seattle is pretty special to us. If only because I'm a huge Death Cab For Cutie fan," Mayberry noted during one of her many asides (during which, thankfully, no one said anything dumb). "I did an open mic once in university and did an absolutely terrible cover of 'Title and Registration' and I didn't win." Then she looked at Doherty and Cook and grinned. "I wonder what that guy is up to now."