As a recent Observer profile noted, Chvrches’ career has a “strange trajectory”. The Scottish trio are a pop band who have achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic through relentless touring, but who have never had a hit single. No shame in that, but it’s something their third album clearly seeks to rectify. The band themselves have shushed such an idea – “we aren’t really playing that game” – but frankly, you don’t call on producers Greg Kurstin and Steve Mac, the people behind Adele’s Hello and Clean Bandit’s Rockabye respectively, if you’re planning on making a 21st-century cross between the Faust Tapes and Diamanda Galás’s The Litanies of Satan.
The sound of its predecessor, 2015’s Every Open Eye, rested on an appealing, time-honoured cocktail of edgy electronics, melodic pop smarts and plaintive, unforced vocals. Love Is Dead does with that sound exactly what you might expect a collaboration with big latter-day pop producers to do. The synths’ prickliness is toned down, the vocals are more strident and Get Out and Forever bear a cinematic, mid-80s sheen. Depending on your perspective, the hooks have either been honed down to streamlined, inescapable earworms, or simplified and repeated to the point where they pitilessly bludgeon the listener into submission. Sometimes this approach really works: the opening Graffiti and the closing Wonderland alike claim squatters’ rights in your brain on first listen. But with the best will in the world, if you release an album on which a song with the hook “deliver-iver-iver” is followed by a song with the hook “forever-forever-forever-and-ever”, which in turn is followed by a song with the hook “never-never-never-ever”, you’re going to run the risk of sounding formulaic.
The lyrics, too, seem to court a vast audience. There are moments when they spark and deliver a powerful emotional punch (“I’m writing to ask you: did you achieve all you wanted to do?”, “Your jealousy is more blind than luck”) but equally there are moments where they seem a little woolly. Like Coldplay, they deal in the kind of generalities that anyone can project anything on to. The cliches pile up: “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, careful what you wish for.”
Their fans are wont to call Chvrches’ music “fearless” and “outspoken”, suggesting it reflects the kind of bold statements their interviews come peppered with. But when the topic turns to politics, the same problems abound. Graves doesn’t quite kick hard enough to rabble-rouse in the way it wants to: it ends up sounding like another addition to the precariously teetering slush-pile of vaguely woke pop. The hope that recent events might lead to the equivalent of that anomalous moment straddling post-punk and the rise of Thatcher, when the charts were alive with incisive, timely political hit singles, seems to have been supplanted by the gloomy realisation that we’ve skipped that phase and ended up with a re-run of what came afterwards. It’s what you might call the You’re About As Easy As a Nuclear War era, when everyone felt impelled to say something about the state of the world whether they had anything interesting or original to say about it or not.
The frustrating thing about this is that Chvrches clearly do have a lot to say. Lauren Mayberry in particular has fearlessly taken a stand against the horrific misogynist abuse routinely doled out to female artists online. And it’s easy to attack Donald Trump in earshot of a sympathetic liberal press, but substantially less straightforward to do it on stage at a gig in the heart of Trump-supporting America, as she also did. You just wish some of that potency had made it into the studio.
But if those are its drawbacks, it’s worth pointing out that Love Is Dead isn’t a bad album. It’s flawed but flecked with great moments: the thrilling bridge of Never Say Die, when the electronics start to growl and fizz; an oblique little instrumental called ii that sounds charmingly like a homage to the oblique little instrumentals on the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. A little troublingly for whoever’s footing the bill for Kurstin’s services, a lot of those great moments arrive without his help. My Enemy, a bleak, careworn duet with the National’s Matt Berninger, and the desolate, minimal ballad Really Gone have precisely the kind of impact missing elsewhere, while the great God’s Plan features Martin Doherty’s vocal smeared over a bank of chattering synths.
The whole thing might well make Chvrches far bigger than they already are. At risk of doling out a backhanded compliment, even the weakest tracks sound like something you’d hear Radio 1 playing to death, and there’s every chance they might gain some heft in front of a festival crowd. But it isn’t the big artistic step forward its creators might hope.
This week Alexis listened to
Róisín Murphy: Innocence
From a new collaboration with producer Maurice Fulton, set to be spread out over a series of 12-inch singles: twitchy, bewitching funk that confirms her as the most leftfield house diva out there.
