While some are saying that in addition to the declaration, Love Is Dead, so, too, is the original talent of CHVRCHES, there is something extremely poetic about the Scottish trio’s latest album, especially in terms of its thematic cohesion. Considering the band’s name, it is, in fact, surprising that they haven’t invoked such blatant religious and death imagery sooner. The simply titled opening track, “Graffiti,” is one of the exceptions to the rule. A fitting homage to the album’s appellation, Lauren Mayberry, in that earnest lilt that only someone who has been truly broken-hearted can convey, paints us the familiar portrait of initials and names graffitied on a bathroom wall as she sings, “We wrote our names along the bathroom walls/Graffitiing our hearts across the stalls/I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old/And now we never will, never will.” The sadness of thinking about all those hearts in bathrooms with couples who are most certainly on to the umpteenth “one” by now is just the sort of morose portrait that builds toward the crescendo of the chorus. Graffitiing one’s heart more than just literally in an etching, perhaps Mayberry realizes that to surrender your heart metaphorically to someone on a bathroom wall in that way you can only take seriously when you’re young is to truly believe that your relationship will be as immortal as the symbols and words left behind—which often do last longer than the relationship itself. But that’s never something you can fathom when you’re in the initial throes, assuming that the passion level will forever sustain itself. Alas, as Mayberry puts it of the folly of immortalized in graffiti young love, “We were just kids then, we didn’t know how and didn’t know when.” The how being how much you will come to hate the one you love and the when being when will that hatred occur. In any case, “Get Out” is a fitting transition in terms of a phrase describing wanting to get out of an oppressive situation. And, as it turns out, the content, too, speaks to that oppressiveness with Mayberry describing, “Talked ourselves to death/Never sayin’ what I wanted/Sayin’ what I needed/I pushed you to the edge/Never knowing what I wanted/Knowing what I needed you to say.” Again, chronicling the sort of crumbling decisiveness that can only come with a young love that has the epiphany of not having the ability to grow old so much as expire, Mayberry’s insistence on getting “out of here” pertains to getting out of a dynamic that is no longer suited to being memorexed in graffiti form.
With the shift in working with producer Greg Kurstin, who has collaborated with an array of bands in the vein of CHVRCHES (e.g. Tegan and Sara, Lily Allen, Beck, Garbage and Peaches), the trio has pushed themselves fully into the arena of pop, which is perhaps why they have achieved a combination of success and “failure” with Love Is Dead, with “Get Out” debuting at #17 on the Billboard charts (specifically “Hot Rock Songs”), the highest entry for CHVRCHES to date. And yet, there are those who would deem this album as “not a faceplant, but a definite stumble”—therefore rightly invoking the wrath of Mayberry herself—and who knows why? Maybe purely because anytime a band tries something slightly different after having found something that works so well for them, critics tend to get a bit snarky (but then, when don’t they? It goes with the territory of being a critic). Chris DeVille, who wrote the review for Stereogum, prompted Mayberry to retort, “Looking down your nose at songs as ‘fight songs for the resistance’ is pretentious, weak behaviour that means more than you think it does—and weirdly says more about you than it does about its creator.” And with that, she achieved “Deliverance,” the title of track three, incidentally, and the first to take on that aforementioned religious metaphor motif. As though speaking to DeVille himself, Mayberry sings, “Trust me when I tell you about my own convictions/Made my mind up long ago”—and no one will tell her otherwise as she throws out the question, “Is it deliver-iver-iverance/If you hurt me in exchange?” Which is, in essence, sort of what she did to DeVille, but hey, we are all prone to hypocrisy—it’s the unspoken eighth deadly sin.
And, speaking of those sins, they can all lead to the core of what the following track, “My Enemy,” is about: jealousy a.k.a. envy. As The National’s Matt Berninger more succinctly puts it, “Your jealousy is more blind than love.” And as the two opposing vocals rehash their sides of the story regarding the unraveling of the relationship (again, Love Is Dead), Mayberry insists, “And you could be my enemy/And you could be my judge/If you could start remembering, all the time that you used up,” while Berninger contradicts, “In the end, we did all the damage that you could want, want/But the emptiness will go on and on.” That emptiness is very much present in “Forever,” another lyrical homage to a breakup in which Mayberry encourages you to “savor the taste, savor the pain” in addition to expressing her biggest regret about the demise of her relationship being telling her ex-loved one that she would hate him forever. And yet, hating someone forever is often times so much more believable than loving them forever. Because, until the robots take over, the propensity for resentment is still so deeply rooted within us all—even those claiming to be on Buddha’s level. Speaking to the constant symbolism of death, “Never Say Die” is the mournful third single that throws a lover’s words back in his face when he inevitably can’t deliver on them—because it’s just so difficult to stay enraptured by the same pussy. Thus, Mayberry demands, “Weren’t you gonna be sorry and weren’t you gonna be pure? Weren’t we gonna be honest and weren’t we gonna be more? Didn’t you say that? Didn’t you say that?” Yeah, sure he fucking said it. But saying and genuinely meaning are so many leagues apart. Still, a girl can’t help falling in and falling out, as Mayberry so accurately delineates. For once the pheromones have infected a girl, she really would like nothing more than the love to live forever. That, of course, would be a “Miracle”—most particularly in the twenty-first century. And, as “Miracle” (yet another spiritual allusion in title) offers, “We’re lookin’ for angels in the darkest of skies,” we can take it to probably mean (if we overanalyze it enough) that women are looking for so-called knights in shining armor in a cesspool of short attention spans, self-involvement and non-commitment as the norm. To put it bluntly, Mayberry says she’s not asking for a miracle, but that’s honestly what it would take to unearth anything resembling monogamy at present.
So follows “Graves,” for what is modern love if not a graveyard of disposable “situationships?” And yet, this track is actually among the most political on Love Is Dead, with Mayberry accusing society at large of being all too capable of dancing on the graves of the less fortunate’s pain by looking away from it with other, much more convenient distractions. This is precisely why, as evidenced in her own freedom fighting personal life, Mayberry declares, “Oh baby you can look away/While they’re dancing on our graves/But I will stop at nothing/Oh, I will stop at nothing.” This, of course, refers to Mayberry’s refusal to let detractors like the aforementioned DeVille mock or malign her for joining “many of her peers in attempting to parse the disastrous state of the world in search of evidence for optimism.”
That criticized optimism bleeds into “Heaven/Hell” (once CHVRCHES popped they couldn’t stop with references to the devout), a song that appeals to differentiating between what’s real and what isn’t, increasingly impossible to decipher in this epoch of saying what you mean “through a silver screen…/But I can’t tell, is this heaven or is this hell? If none of this is real, then show me what you feel/‘Cause I can’t tell.” And, like love and hate itself, it’s true that there is so often a fine line between heaven and hell, with the elements we once thought would lead to paradise suddenly becoming part of the contribution to a nightmarish dystopia (that’s shading you, technology).
Echoing the sound of TR/ST on 2014’s Joyland with “God’s Plan” (yes, they dared to call a song that so soon after Drake—surely they wanted a mashup or collaboration out of it) thanks to Martin Doherty’s stoic yet sincere vocals, we’re taken on a more ethereal journey, sonically speaking, toward the third act of Love Is Dead, building toward the fade out with the mental preparation of the title “Really Gone,” wherein Mayberry discusses girding her mind for the days of apathy ahead, asserting, “I’m trying my best to toughen up for these days/And maybe I’ll find another time for this place”—this “place” perhaps being a collective mental state of insensitivity and indifference.
The dramatic, piano-centric interlude, “ii,” leads us out of the dark and into the light with “Wonderland,” an 80s-influenced uptempo and upbeat coda that dichotomously expounds on the same thesis as “Graves,” with Mayberry reminding herself that she “can’t live forever with [her] head in the clouds,” knowing that to ignore the human trauma all around us defies most philosophical principles. And once again returning to the theme of escaping from all the bullshit as she did on “Get Out,” Mayberry defies anyone to argue with the fact that she always “knew we had to get away, knew we had to get away/All along.” But that which we must get away from has nothing to do with location so much as a state of mind that promotes an effortless vegetative existence over an active one that seeks to still at least attempt to make change. Mayberry isn’t just accusing love in the romantic sense of being dead, but love in all its forms—love, above all, for one’s fellow human. And this could very well be what turns out to be the greatest twenty-first century tragedy—and out of so many others to choose from.
