There is no dry ice. There are no fierce dancers filling the space between the three members of Chvrches, pulling jerky shapes. The noise coming out of the speakers – so loud it almost blows your hair back – sounds like thoroughly retro-now electronic pop, crammed as it is full of driving beats, 80s earworms and 21st-century pre-choruses.
The lights mean business, too, on this first of two sold-out, mid-tour nights in Manchester. These rectangular bars of colour, strobes and mini-searchlights are more suited to a cellar club than the warm, twinkly Victorian grandeur of the Albert Hall, but they match the gale of synthesized sound emanating from the twin keyboard bays of Iain Cook (no hat, also plays bass) and Martin Doherty (hat, also sings one impassioned lead vocal on Under the Tide).
Chirruping over the top of this din is Lauren Mayberry, a singer whose pure, penetrating tones come as though pre-Auto-Tuned. She looks as though she has been teleported in from the 90s, with her bovver-boots-and-little-black-dress approach to the vexed business of being a female on a stage. Too sexy, and you become just another girl singer, unleashing the idiot trolls and their rapey “bantz”. Too prim, and you rob your music of its groin region.
Mayberry gets it just right: human female, nobody’s fool. The all-black outfit is less a goth signifier than a businesslike convenience. As Cook and Doherty bug out behind their banks of gear, Mayberry windmills around out front, thwacking the ground at the end of the mid-tempo Playing Dead, spinning her mic lead like a lasso, clambering on the boxes arrayed on the front of the stage (the monitors are presumably housed inside them).
But as Chvrches unleash tune after bittersweet tune from their two albums – 2013’s hit The Bones of What You Believe, which has sold somewhere between half a million and a million copies, and its successor, Every Open Eye, released in September, which went top five – you wonder what is missing. This tour, like the American one that preceded it, is sold out (or near-as). The reasons to believe are all here.
Never Ending Circles, the opening track of Every Open Eye, is bigger and bolder live than its pretty album incarnation. Lies, a highlight from the first record recently covered by Muse, finds Mayberry punching along to the drums, fattened as though for Christmas. Leave a Trace is easily as fab a pop song as The Mother We Share (the first album’s sucker punch, still the final encore), perhaps even better crafted.
Perhaps the new ones – Make Them Gold, say, big on watery affirmation – lack the secret venom of the old songs like Gun, in which Mayberry, the picture of innocence, makes like a bunny boiler if you listen in to the words. Perhaps it is the absence of mystique, something that usually goes hand in glove with this kind of electronic musicianship. You kind of expect a band called Chvrches – with that savvy, search-engine-optimising “v” – to come with some austere, forbidding quality. Rolling their little drum kit on and off the stage repeatedly does not help matters.
There is a sort of cognitive dissonance afoot tonight, perhaps, around context: Chvrches are a synth-pop band who have not yet transitioned to the pop arena, to the big video screens either side of wide stages. They sound like they are going mano a mano with the big boys, with your Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Gouldings; they sound like La Roux with mass appeal. Sometimes, they sound a little like (whisper it) Coldplay, if Coldplay really loved Depeche Mode.
But Chvrches are still playing indie rock venues in the indie rock idiom, as down-to-earth people. Mayberry’s between song chit-chat flits from the pleasure of stinking of last night’s curry to how unnerved she is that the circle seating curves round, so that some of the crowd is behind her.
On the one hand, you deeply admire how Chvrches are once again taking on the cabal of committee-made international pop by crafting this commercial music by themselves, in an unprepossessing Glasgow house converted for the purpose. On the other, their songs – icy, expansive things, full of bitterness and hope as well as melodies and clout – are writing cheques that the band aren’t quite cashing. What’s missing from this 18-plus venue is the under-18s, waving homemade banners and going nuts.
