By Mike Frash //
CHVRCHES //
The Independent – San Francisco
March 10th, 2016 //
Super-buzzy Scottish electronic pop group CHVRCHES (pronounced as you would expect, “Churches”) played their debut show in the U.S. on Sunday night. The Independent in SF hosted the synth-heavy trio, which sold out their first U.S. concert months in advance. CHVRCHES have only two shows on the docket, this SF performance and one down the California coast in Los Angeles, before heading to South by Southwest to likely make a big splash.
This was a brief show (around 47 minutes), but it’s not surprising since CHVRCHES have not released their debut EP yet, let alone a full album. The good news is their songs are well-developed for the stage, and Lauren Mayberry’s vocals deliver in a live setting. Mayberry exhibited some nerves at the beginning of the set, but she grew more comfortable with each song. By the time Mayberry revealed she might have left the iron on in her hotel room and she neurotically kept thinking she might burn down the hotel even after alerting hotel staff, she had connected with the crowd packed into The Indy.
The show finished with the track that put CHVRCHES on the map, “The Mother We Share”. This addictive song, along with “Recover”, are so accessible they could be radio hits a year from now. Surely CHVRCHES are a group on the rise; any artist that can get a Monday crowd rowdy and materialize fans who sing along to songs without a proper record release foreshadows good things to come.
Setlist:
Lies
We Sink
Lungs
Now Is Not the Time
Gun
Science/Visions
Night Sky
Recover
Under the Tide
The Mother We Share
Encore:
I Would Die 4 U (Prince cover)
Wow, this is some CHVRCHES history and glad you captured it through words and photos. If we could go back in time this would certainly rank high on our list of CHVRCHES shows to attend. Great to read about their early days and see how far the have progressed in such a short amount of time. What a gifted group of musicians they are.