The cover for CHVRCHES’ fourth album, Screen Violence, is literal in one way and yet utterly metaphorical in another. The image of a hand grabbing at the blinds on a screen indicates a final struggle (appropriately, there’s a song called “Final Girl” on the record). That is to say, our final struggle in surrendering completely to the screen. And all its various violences. The attacks we see represented as “art,” the ones we see represented as “news” and, most pervasive of all, the one on our senses—dulling them with each passing day.
This includes, of course, atrocities against women, somehow almost more trivialized in a post-#MeToo climate precisely because men “don’t want to hear about it anymore.” About all the wrongs they do. All the ways in which most of their behavior is interpretable as harassment of some variety. Thus, CHVRCHES’ first single from the album was “He Said She Said,” which felt like a pointed choice for tying into a key theme of this ten-track opus. Commencing with “Asking For A Friend,” Lauren Mayberry’s Scottish lilt is initially at its most pronounced during the intro, when she remarks, “I guess I have to try, it’s the art of getting by.” That’s one aspect that fits into Mayberry’s description of the track as “depressing but hopeful.” What everyone is still trying to be despite daily evidence to the contrary. Sonically, it fits in with that contrast as well, opening with a morose ambience that eventually leads into the more danceable rhythm timed to Mayberry’s chant, “You still matter.” As though wanting to remind all of us who have felt cut down to (even smaller) size over the last year that maybe we might. She declares, “I don’t want to say that I’m afraid to die/The past is in the past, it isn’t meant to last/But if I can’t let go, will you carry me home?/Can we celebrate the end?/I’m asking for a friend.”
Mayberry and her bandmates, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, might have been hoping, like so many, to celebrate the “end” of coronavirus while they were making this record during the lockdown era, but they, too, have found that only a new slew of issues has arisen in its still-ongoing “aftermath” (a word choice that doesn’t seem fitting for something that keeps going). Like a more proper version of Dorothy Gale, Mayberry asks, “Home/Can we go?” It’s hard to know anymore, what with all these goddamn travel restrictions. And in this regard, Thomas Wolfe could never have known how prophetic the statement, “You can’t go home again” would be.
Vibrant and uplifting electrobeats open the powerful “He Said She Said” before cutting to the quick of its motif. One that addresses the constant gaslighting women are subjected to as part and parcel of never being able to “get it right.” That is, the continuing false ideal of how men think a woman should “be.” Trying to fall into this trap inevitably proves to be a vicious circle, one elucidated by the lyrics, “He said, ‘It’s all in your head/But keep an ear to the grapevine’/And, ‘Get drunk, but don’t be a mess.’” This barrage of constantly conflicting “advice” about how to be the “best possible” woman (in a land called “Male Fantasy”) was also explored by Camille Rainville in her work, “Be A Lady They Said” (later bastardized by a Cynthia Nixon recitation). Acknowledging the sheer impossibility of embodying everything a woman is somehow expected to be, Rainville wrote, among other contradictions in “being a lady,” “You look frumpy. Loosen up. Show some skin. Look sexy. Look hot. Don’t be so provocative. You’re asking for it. Wear black. Wear heels. You’re too dressed up. You’re too dressed down. Don’t wear those sweatpants; you look like you’ve let yourself go.”
Mayberry, too, has some conflicting male “requests” to take to task as she sings, “He said, ‘You need to be fеd/But keep an eye on your waistline’/And, ‘Look good, but don’t bе obsessed’/Keep thinkin’ over, over/I try, but it’s hard to know what’s right/When I feel like I’m borrowin’ all of my time/And it’s hard to hit rewind/When I feel like I’m losin’ my mind.” What woman doesn’t amid such constantly impossible standards put forth by a patriarchal society? In truth, the topic hasn’t been met with such oozing sarcasm since No Doubt’s “Just A Girl.”
The pressures of perfection are probed via a different subject matter on the following track. Because “California” is a song title that never goes out of style, CHVRCHES brings us the latest ditty called as such. And right on the heels of Lorde doing the same with a song on Solar Power. Except CHVRCHES has the decency to show the Golden State a little more reverence instead of pissing all over it with some self-righteous, “I’m too decent to be a celebrity” rhetoric. Where Lorde said, “Don’t want that California love,” Mayberry goes more philosophical with, “Nobody ever warns ya/You’ll die in California.” And well, it’s kind of true. California has always been a place where people go to die—but in a good way, if that makes sense. Seen as a place with the panacea of sunshine and “fresh air” (need one bother saying this was well before wildfires were an unshakeable norm?), people (particularly affluent people) with all manner of diseases would fly over from the East to take advantage of the state’s purported healing properties. Some lived and, yes, some died.
In CHVRCHES’ scenario, however, it’s not about literal dying so much as going to California (a music and media capital, after all) to watch your dream slowly die, ergo a part of yourself. Of the song, Doherty admitted, “Everyone who moves to L.A. does a California song, so we were conscious of not doing that. But no one ever makes songs about the dark side of what happens if you get stuck here and you’re a failure and your entire life almost becomes somewhat meaningless and you have to retreat.” L.A.—and most of California—being a “bedroom community,” that isn’t too hard to do. Which is why it’s so unfathomable that the state had such high COVID rates when it’s ideal for self-isolating.
Setting the impending Robert Smith tone with the instrumentation, “Violent Delights” is the song that most obviously speaks to the notion of “screen violence.” Not to mention the phrase’s origins from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play with violent elements that were amplified all the more when Baz Luhrmann adapted it. As for the dream/nightmare aspects of the song, they were inspired by a particularly active REM landscape for Mayberry, paired with her realization that, “I feel like we’re all morbidly fascinated with the violence that happens to other people.” This supposed “fascination” is only fueled by what we’re dosed with on a daily basis by mass media. Gone are the days when anybody could get through a single instant without “consuming.” Which is clearly why we’ve all become soulless. Accordingly, Mayberry takes it back to the idea: “A photograph will steal your soul,” adding, “An epitaph won’t make you whole.” Sonically, Doherty name-checks The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation as an influence. With gritty lyrics to match, including Mayberry’s macabre sentiment, “If I disappear, thеy’ll say I killed myself/I nevеr feared for my own health/These violent delights/Keep creeping into my nights/And they’re reading my rites/And I’ll never sleep alone again.” Unfortunately, Mayberry will probably be faced with the reality presented by a fellow Brit, Damon Albarn, who once crooned, “I sleep alone.”
The moody aura persists (naturally) on “How Not to Drown” featuring Robert Smith. Its video, directed by Scott Kiernan (who has sustained a cohesive aesthetic on their other singles from this album, “He Said She Said” and “Good Girls,” as well), offers drowning imagery in spades—complete with that frequently seen symbol of the revolving door that also makes appearances in their other videos. For women, the significance of a revolving door tends to indicate just how disposably they’re treated. Seen as nothing more than yet another “dumb bitch” to shuffle out when she doesn’t meet the (impossible) “demands.”
But Mayberry is determined to be a “Final Girl.” Like “California,” this song is an exploration of all the self-doubt that comes with trying to make it in an impossible industry geared toward “art.” “Art” in quotes because, well, can it ever really remain art once it’s commodified? So it is that Mayberry experiences the pressure of it all becoming too great as she bemoans, “And it feels like the weight is too much to carry/I should quit, maybe go get married/Only time will tell/And I wonder if I should’ve changed my accent/Tried to make myself more attractive/Only time will tell.” This leads in to her analogy about the final girl, a horror movie trope that was quite helpful to her in the writing of this album, for, as she stated, “There’s something about the female experience in horror that you can relate to—the feeling of being watched and hunted and chased, which has been a big part of my relationship with being a woman…” Hence, the chorus, “In the final cut/In the final scene/There’s a final girl/And you know that she should be screaming,” and later, “In the final cut/In the final scene/There’s a final girl/Does she look like me?” One certainly hopes so.
Speaking of the final girl trope, everyone knows that in order to be one, she has to be “pure” (read: a virgin). This grotesque notion of what it means to be a “good girl” is explored with raw ferocity on, what else, “Good Girls.” As another spotlight on “the misogynistic ideals inflicted upon women,” Mayberry berates the male privilege of constantly expecting to be “allowed” to start over again after repeating the same unconscionable behavior. In some ways, it mimics the line in Lorde’s “Dominoes” when she says, “You get fifty gleaming chances in a row/And I watch you flick thеm down like dominoes/Must feel good being Mr. Start Again.” This, in part, is why the worship of male idols has persisted for so long (think about someone like Woody Allen). So it is that Mayberry urges us to kill them (metaphorically speaking, of course).
A homesick yearning for Glasgow takes hold on “Lullabies,” with string arrangements directly inspired by Scottish band The Blue Nile. Bringing the screen imagery back into the mix, Mayberry rues, “Paralyzed and spinning backwards/Lullabies don’t comfort me/Televise the great disaster/We’re better off inside of the screen/I’m terrified of falling faster.” Whether this is falling faster into the abyss of total depression that comes with living in the present or the pit of numbness that tends to arrive with living inside a screen (even if it feels like a “protective cocoon”) is left to the listener’s discretion.
Among the most dramatic offerings, “Nightmares” reminds one of the operatic nature of “Goodbye” on MARINA’s Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land. Tellingly, both songs are about relationships. Yet Mayberry admits that there’s only one song on the album about this topic because writing about them becomes a “horrible repeating saga,” an idea mimicked by the verses rehashing relationships and the chorus being about Mayberry “being frustrated at writing about relationships.”
Analyzing how, on the one hand, she does get satisfaction from the revenge a song about an ex can provide, but on the other, she’s stuck with the wound forever after making it truly permanent, Mayberry admits, “I get the last word only because I write on the walls in my head/Maybe some things are better unsaid/To be left on the sheets of your bed.” The clincher comes with the moving chorus that finds her asking, “Can I forgive if I forget/All my mistakes and my regrets?/If all of this is for the best?” Maybe not, but there is something to be said for when a female musician creates a song that can be categorized in the pantheon of “You Oughta Know.”
A song title that sounds like the best life advice going forward from 2020, “Better If You Don’t” concludes the taut ten-track record (their most “compact” album to date). Another reminiscent ode to previous days spent in Glasgow, Mayberry noted of the composition, “When you can’t go home to a place or time, there’s grief to that. This song looks like a night out in rainy Glasgow when I was twenty-two. I can’t go back to any of that—it literally doesn’t exist.” Which is why she announces, “It’s better if I don’t dwell but if I do/I won’t call on you again.”
She also brings back the motif that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 pioneered, present throughout most of Screen Violence: the notion of “parlor walls.” More to the point, wall-to-wall screens that people become addicted to as they view the things and people on it as something easier to connect to than those in real life. Mayberry describes in “Better If You Don’t,” “TV’s on but facing at the wall/Can they tell I don’t like me at all?” Something about it smacks of Mildred Montag, and of her husband lamenting, “Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me, I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say.” It’s hard to achieve that when everyone’s head is buried in their screen (violence).
As the most acoustic offering on Screen Violence, “Better If You Don’t” provides a tranquil denouement to a stormy journey. The calm after the storm. Or perhaps the calm before another one. Then again, it could just be the calm that mirrors our collective bovine resignation thanks to our parlor walls.
