Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Chvrches’ Category

Lauren Mayberry (Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA, February 17, 2025)

Posted in Chvrches, Cult of Venus, Lauren Mayberry, Philadelphia, PA, Union Transfer on February 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: February 17, 2025] Lauren Mayberry

I was a fan of Chvrches when their first album came out.  Then I kind of lost track of them.  But in that time my wife became a fan.  We missed their last tour in Philly (back in 2021 (!)).  When Lauren Mayberry released a solo album, we both loved the single “Something in the Air” and  thought it would be neat to see her live.

The show didn’t sell very well, which was surprising I thought, since Chvrches has sold out Franklin Music Hall, a much bigger venue.  But it meant that we had a really intimate show, which was awesome.

Overall I liked most of the album Vicious Creature, although there were a few songs that I wasn’t that excited by.  But wow, these songs were fantastic live!  

She had two band members on stage and, I think, a guy on the side with a bank of Apple laptops (I joked that it looked like an Apple store–there were about five!).  The two members on stage were Marian Li-Pino on drums and Heather Nation doing guitar or bass depending on the song.  Later in the set, Heather played piano and Marian played guitar for a song, too.

Heather Nation was ferocious on guitar–generating great sounds.  And Marian Li-Pino was a beast on the drums.  They had a cool cymbal that was bent and made a great metallic, non-cymbal sound.  And Lauren Mayberry was an excellent front woman–she knows how to perform a show.   And what a voice!  I mean, it was amazing.

She played the entire album.  The bangers were amazing–bigger and louder than I expected.  The quieter songs were pretty, a little too mellow for my enjoyment, but hey, you need to vary the mood.  (more…)

Read Full Post »

Cult of Venus (Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA, February 17, 2025) [LAUREN MAYBERRY]

Posted in Chvrches, Cult of Venus, Lauren Mayberry, Philadelphia, PA, Union Transfer on February 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

[ATTENDED: February 17, 2025] Cult of Venus

It was a cold windy night when we headed out to this show.  Luckily, we managed to get really close parking (Monday night shows are good for that).  Which meant we were plenty early to see the opening act, Cult of Venus.

Cult of Venus has had a lot of mystery surrounding her.  I’m sure her identity is known (I didn’t look too hard to find it), but the two main articles I saw gave this info:

Forgoing any photos to remain completely anonymous and undefined, Cult of Venus have given themself the perfect platform from which to build and long and exciting career. ][They make] music that illustrates and illuminates the dystopian world today, challenging the patriarchy and resonating with the “divine feminine.” Her on-the-ground activist work includes support for incarcerated women and environmental protest movements. Her mysterious presentation is often shrouded in darkness, with her identity and face in the shadows. Her secretive appearance aligns her poetic soundscape in a way that not only drives more curiosity to her audience but is calming in a world so focused on desperate self-promotion.  With shows in all-female prisons and detention centres in the books already, as well as a show as part of New York City’s Women’s March, Cult of Venus have a big year planned while being rooted in reform.

They opened the show with a prerecorded message about strength in the face of oppression.  And then she came out, picked up her guitar and stood in front of the keyboard.  

The only problem to me was the fairly lengthy (I mean, it was probably less than a minute, but it was SO QUIET) pause before the first song started.  I feel like she could have timed that a little more smoothly.  But whatever.

She generated some beats and some synths and proved to have a fantastic voice.  When she played guitar, she clearly had it patched into an effects box because it didn’t sound like a guitar–it was very cool. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Dr. Matteo Farinella & Dr. Hana Roš–Neurocomic (2013)

Posted in 18th Century, 19th Century, Adventure, Chvrches, Dr. Hana Roš, Dr. Matteo Farinella, Graphic Novel, Neuroscience, Scientists, Tiny Desk Concert, William Gibson on June 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

neuroSOUNDTRACK: CHVRCHES-Tiny Desk Concert #356 (May 12, 2014).

chvChvrches are just on this side of the kind of synth pop that I like.  I simply can’t deny the awesomely catchiness of “Recover” which must be due to Lauren Mayberry’s wonderful voice, or perhaps the bubbly synth sounds that the three of them generate.  In this Tiny Desk version, they brought all kinds of synths along with them.  I don’t know what they normally play live, but this is an amusing sight to see 4 keyboards (for three players)—all of the musicians with their arms hanging down as they play their instruments (synths that are about a foot long and boxes with lots and lots of dials).

“Gun” is a darker sounding song, but again Mayberry’s voice is so clear it cuts through the dark sounds.

I enjoyed that before they played “The Mother We Share” she asked if she could curse.  NPR says yes and she says good for them.  (There is a parental advisory for that one curse word too).  She also says this is the nicest but oddest gig that they have played.  She is charming and it just makes me like them even more.

[READ: June 3, 2014] Neurocomic

First I saw the name of the publisher–Nobrow Press–then I saw the name of the graphic novel–“Neurocomic” and I imagined some sort of sci-fi riff on Gibson’s Neuromancer.  Then I saw that both authors were doctors and I thought that it was going to be some kind of science book.  But the cover has a drawing of a brain and a squid and some other kind of creature and from there I just decided I had better see what this was.

So, this actually proves to be a very basic history of neuroscience.  With a plot.

As the story opens our hero, a rather generic looking fellow, is walking along a landscape when he sees a woman (presumably beautiful) with whom he seems to fall in love.  He is suddenly sucked into someone’s brain and then onto a forest floor.  He is confused and upset and has to find a way out.

Welcome to chapter 1: Morphology.  Our hero learns he is not in a forest, he is in a brain and those trees are neurons.  And he has run into Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934) and Camillo Golgi (1843-1926).  They explain to our guy about neurons and axons, but really he just wants out.  So they tell him to enter a neuron and on we go… (more…)

Read Full Post »

John Le Carré–“A Delicate Truth” (Harper’s, April 2013)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Chvrches, Excerpt, Harper's, John Le Carré, Skyfall, Spies, Threats on March 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »

HarpersaprilSOUNDTRACK: CHVRCHES-“The Mother We Share” (SXSW, March 23, 2013).

chvrchesThis year NPR doesn’t seem to be offering many full shows from SXSW for download.  But they do have a number of streaming songs.  And since I have recently reduced the amount of time I can dedicate to posts, I’m going to talk about a few songs rather than albums for a bit.

I’ve never heard of Chvrches although NPR leads me to believe they have a buzz around them.  They’re from Glasgow (I like the Glasgow scene), but this song is really way too poppy for me.  At least in this live incarnation, it’s so spare and keyboardy.  The lead singer has a great voice but it is firmly placed in the pop realm (especially with the Oh Oh Ohs).

The band is good though, and I enjoyed the synth guy making most of the sounds of the song.    I’d be curious to hear more (especially t hat cover of “Purple Rain.”  Watch it here.

[READ: March 18, 2013] “A Delicate Truth”

I have never read John Le Carré before.  Indeed, I don’t typically read any kind of spy/thriller type books.  I realized recently that I like mysteries but I don’t have a lot of time for hard spy novels (if I may use the language of sci-fi to describe a spy novel–perhaps spy-fi?).

We recently watched some of Skyfall (the Redbox had to go back so we didn’t finish it–I think I’m not down with the Redbox, it’s just as inconvenient as a video store), so this British spy-fi story seemed nicely timed.

This was an excerpt from Le Carré’s forthcoming book.  And regardless of the story itself, I’m delighted that it was a self-contained excerpt.  It is a mission and the mission ends by the end of the chapter   Obviously there is a lot more to the book, but I was pleased that the excerpt didn’t having any kind of cliffhanger.  And now I don’t feel like I have to read anymore of the story.

So this is the story of Paul Anderson or, “Paul Anderson,” a “middle-ranking British civil servant  hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity.”  That pretty much sums up the story and you can tell from that sentence whether or not you’ll like the book.  I have no idea if this sort of thing happens in real life at all.  And maybe that’s not the point.  In the Afterword, Le Carré talks about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his first novel, which everyone assumed was all true (he says you know it’s not true because they printed it).  And he;s always been annoyed that people think of his as a spy who started writing rather than an author who did some spy work.

So I guess that means he knows of what he speaks. (more…)

Read Full Post »