There is always a big question mark hovering over an artist when they strike out from a well-established band and opt to make a solo album: will it follow firmly in the treads of their main project, deliberately seat itself in another sonic space, or land somewhere in between? Lauren Mayberry is one of the latest artists to provide an answer, releasing her first solo effort, Vicious Creature, via EMI after more than a decade at the helm of CHVRCHES, a hugely-prominent Scottish pop act. They took off rapidly with the enduring charms of The Bones of What You Believe, and 2021’s Screen Violence saw Mayberry sharing lead vocals with none other than Robert Smith of The Cure, and ending live shows in a blood-soaked “Final Girl” costume, a nod to the horror movie trope also encompassed in that album’s title.
Things have been quiet on the full-band front though, and Vicious Creature demonstrates why: Mayberry has been crafting a multifaceted solo record that runs a wider stylistic gamut than everything she’s been a part of before. It lends itself both to a three-piece band performance, as well as a more intimate pre-show acoustic preview, and she does both at Cambridge’s Sinclair club one evening in mid-February, following on from the December release of her album. In a nod to one of its tracks, ‘A Work of Fiction’, from which the title derives, her main set is heralded by one of those standard disclaimers, declaring that, ‘This is a work of fiction… any similarities to real events is entirely coincidental’. That track doesn’t appear in actuality until later, though, and she begins instead with ‘Crocodile Tears’ and ‘Change Shapes’, two of Vicious Creature’s highlights that firmly channel her well-honed synthpop talents and provide gorgeous canvases for her voice to shine. The former is more maximalist, while the latter is leaner, riding a funky, punchy, bass-driven structure.
Mayberry also weaves in the tenderest moments of the album into the full-band performance – in fact, she plays the entirety of its dozen tracks throughout the night. ‘Anywhere But Dancing’ employs an acoustic guitar as part of its gentle punctuation in the pacing of the night, which she prefaces with the announcement that “We’re going to play this sad one…” The one non-album track she alights on is a cover of The Verve’s iconic ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ that begins with her playing solo at a keyboard situated at the back-center of the stage. The original song is a wall-to-wall anthem, but this rendition showcases a quieter interpretation at the outset before moving on into a full-bore, more traditional cover by the midpoint, with Mayberry returning to her starting point near the keyboard at the end of the song, hands posed above her head. She’s choreographed a fair bit of the show, with props including a deep-red landline phone early on, and later employing a megaphone to augment vocals.
The highlight of the album, and the night, is arguably ‘Sorry, Etc.’, a heads-down, hard-charging post-punk number unlike anything else on the record. It forms the closer of her main set, a shouty, angry number on the dearth of patriarchal accountability, which she dedicates to the “Final Girls” in the audience. On returning for an encore, she says self-deprecatingly: “I know that ‘singer-from-band-does-solo-project’ is a nightmare,” before thanking everyone for coming and promising to return with CHVRCHES before long. The encore features ‘Oh, Mother’, which she says is for anyone with “mother stuff, good or bad”. It’s a spare, tender-hearted, truly vulnerable song, one final flex of tone before capping things off perfectly with ‘Sunday Best’, which, like the openers, is exemplary of what Mayberry has been doing so well for many years. She even joins in a bit on drums before the performance ends, having given to the audience absolutely everything Vicious Creature has to offer. And while there have certainly been some singer-goes-solo albums in history that did live up to being a “nightmare”, or at least underwhelming, this album and tour is anything but.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux
