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Lauren Mayberry: Vicious Creature review – Chvrches singer writes her own pop gospel
The Scottish star’s solo debut is about ‘empowering myself to listen to my own intuition’ – leading her to alternately clumsy and deft songs influenced by Y2K pop
Artwork for Vicious Creature.Vicious Creature takes a noticeably more straightforwardly pop tack than Chvrches’ trademark pile-up of distorted synthesisers, topped with a vocal style that Mayberry recently compared to a “sad robot”. In Mayberry’s telling, she always loved the kind of artists that Vicious Creature occasionally evokes, among them Fatboy Slim (the piano that appears at the start of Sunday Best has a distinct ring of Praise You about it), All Saints, whose influence looms large over opener Something in the Air and Avril Lavigne, who you could easily imagine singing the acoustic guitar-driven Anywhere But Dancing, with its memories of teenage discos and all that came with them (“downing all the gossip under neon lights … hands beneath a T-shirt on a Tuesday night”). Change Shapes condemns music industry sexism, but suggests Mayberry has “learned the rules”: “We’re all snakes, but what’s a girl supposed to do?” A Work of Fiction’s male lead seems to be a posturing jerk, but, the song admits, that’s what makes him attractive.
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