Synthpop Efficiency on "Keep You On My Side" by Chvrches
Drumming Upstream 20
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums. Once I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 460 songs left to go!
This week I learned “Keep You On My Side” by the Scottish synth-pop trio Chvrches. That’s pronounced “Churches”. This is the first of three Chvrches songs in this series, so I’m going to omit certain parts of their history in order to save them for later entries when they’ll be more appropriate.
Put on your Sunday best. We’re going to Chvrch.
Side A
“Keep You On My Side”
By Chvrches
Every Open Eye
Released on September 25, 2015
Liked on September 29th, 2015
I’m sorry to make you scroll back up right when you got to the meat of this letter, but take a look at the date of “Keep You On My Side”’s release and the date that I Liked it on Spotify. Four days. That’s all it took for me to decide that Chvrches deserved at least one green heart for their sophomore album Every Open Eye. Maybe you’re picturing me listening to the album on repeat for 96 hours straight, speedrunning the personal attachment I’ve described with other songs in Drumming Upstream. The truth is far more mundane. When I Liked “Keep You On My Side” I was listening to Every Open Eye for the first time. No hours of deliberation, no grand emotional journey, just “hey this song is cool, let me make sure I remember it”.
I might have been quick to declare my affection for Every Open Eye, but I was late to Chvrches. The first tracks that earned them buzz on the internet in early 2013 missed me entirely. I only heard about The Bones of What You Believe, the band’s debut that compiled those viral hits, when it kept popping up in Best Of The Year lists. This alone was not enough to lure me in, but it did get my attention. Chvrches sealed the deal with a trick that could only have worked on me in 2014: they covered the Game Of Thrones theme.
Besides appealing to my baser interests as a fantasy fan, this off the cuff video told me all I needed to know to give Chvrches an earnest shot. First, the video made it clear that they work on some heavy duty hardware. Those synths are not cheap. Second, they use that hardware to make big, chunky grooves and clear melodies. The original Game of Thrones theme does not bump like the Chvrches version. If that was the kind of rhythm they cooked up for goofy covers, their originals were sure to knock even harder. Finally, and I apologize for being crass, this video proved beyond a doubt that their singer behind the camera, Lauren Mayberry, was god damn adorable. Put yourself in the shoes of a 24 year old Ian, listen to her adlibed “do-do-doooo” and try to not develop a crush. Good luck.
The Bones of What You Believe confirmed and complicated each of these presumptions. The band clearly were professionals with professional level gear, but they also weren’t flashy. Despite the high caliber instrumentation, The Bones of What You Believe has a rough-around-the-edges charm that reveals its self-produced origins. Chvrches didn’t just settle for hard-hitting beats either. The songs on Mother are laser precise works of pop craftsmanship. Every melody has a counter-melody, every song a huge hook, and no inch of the arrangement is left unaccounted for. Whoever was writing these songs clearly wasn’t new to the practice. And Mayberry’s sweetness as a singer belied her viciousness as a lyricist. Across the record Mayberry compares herself to guns & thorns to rip her former lovers to shreds.
Thoroughly hooked, I only had one question: where did Chvrches come from? The literal answer is Glasgow, Scotland, which Mayberry’s accent makes self-evident. A better way to ask the question is “how did Chvrches blow up so fast?” There’s a helpful maxim I heard once on the No Effects podcast: it takes ten years of hard work to be an overnight success. Exhibits A and B: Iain Cook & Martin Doherty. Before connecting with Mayberry, who prior to Chvrches sang in a saccharine emo band called Blue Sky Archive, Cook & Doherty had long runs in the Glasgow indie rock scene. Doherty, he’s the guy perpetually wearing a hat, was a live guitarist for The Twilight Sad, a band I never checked out because I dislike their name (sorry!). Cook spent most of the 2000s in Aereogramme, a hard-edged post rock band that I knew from a collaborative EP they released with former Drumming Upstream subject Isis.1 Sick of guitars and "trying to make weird music immediate,” the two started writing music on synthesizers with the express goal of "making immediate music weirder".
Stick around long enough in any music scene and you’ll see it happen: a band gives it an earnest go but never makes it big, they break up and some of their members come back with a new project and a vengeance, putting out great work from right out the gate and avoiding all of the previous act’s hurdles. Second Bands outpace the first band in a fraction of the time it took the first band to get anywhere at all. Japanese Breakfast are the Second Band of Little Big League. Stuck are a Second Band of Yeesh. Chvrches are without a doubt a Second Band. When their songs took off online a younger band might have gotten in their own way but Chvrches hit the ground running parlaying the hype into a record contract and then touring the material for two years straight. They hit the late night TV circuit hard. They made themselves hard to avoid, popping up in soundtracks to young adult blockbusters like The Hunger Games and stylish video games like Mirror’s Edge. They were apparently unavoidable in retail playlists, according to anecdotal conversations and the opening of Pitchfork’s review of Every Open Eye, although I can’t confirm this personally since I couldn’t buy clothes in person in my early 20s without having a panic attack.2 The trio were working overtime to give you chance of stumbling across them.
With their feet firmly in the door, Chvrches didn’t waste time working on a follow up. As a Second Band’s sophomore record, Every Open Eye is the product of a band in full control of their sound with hours of road-tested market research under their belt. The rough edges of Bones have all been shaved down into sleek lines. The hooks are, if not better, more pronounced and harder to miss. Though both Bones and Every Open Eye were self-produced, the Chvrches that returned home in 2015 knew what excited crowds live and recalibrated their songwriting to match. Case in point: “Keep You On My Side”.
“Keep You On My Side” is not a single. It doesn’t have a music video. But YouTube is rich with evidence that Chvrches knew it would kill live. Though not technically an EDM act, Chvrches aren’t too proud to employ the genre’s cheap thrills. “Keep You On My Side” is built for strobe lights and packed dance floors, riding a relentless bass drum thump from start to finish. The song only pauses long enough to bring the pulse back louder and stronger. Unlike other Chvrches songs that rise to match their vocal melodies, the music on “Keep You On My Side” crashes at Mayberry’s voice in waves. Even without a top line (what they call the singing on a pop tune in da biz) the sheer momentum of the underlying track could win over even the most inattentive festival attendee.
But let’s not kid ourselves, without Mayberry we wouldn’t be talking about Chvrches in this series. If you don’t believe me, try listening to the Chvrches songs where she’s not singing lead. There’s a reason there’s only of those per album on the first two Chvrches records. As in the NBA, when you have a star on your team you’d be a fool to keep them on the bench. Even when faced with a dance track as foolproof as “Keep You On My Side”, Mayberry isn’t content to be a house diva repeating a handful of lines. Instead, true to her description of the record on the Andy Greenwald podcast as “emo with synths”, she turned in a performance that transmutes anxiety into dance-floor catharsis. Unlike the ex’s whose bridges she gleefully burned on the band’s debut, Mayberry finds herself desperately maintaining a failing relationship on “Keep You On My Side”. In the verses she darts around the song’s beat and clipping off the ends of her phrases like she’s avoiding a confrontation. Then when the crush of the chorus comes roaring down at her, Mayberry grips to the downbeat with white knuckles, letting her voice strain over the onslaught of low end. The chorus is a storm, and Mayberry sings like she’s praying her house stays upright in the wake. Mayberry’s performances inverts the tension-and-release loop of dance music into a dysfunctional cycle that returns inevitably to conflict.
25 year old Ian had reason to relate to Mayberry’s denial and desperation, but I can say with certainty that none of the song’s lyrical themes made it through my thick skull in September of 2015. I Liked “Keep You On My Side” for its surface. I was compelled by how Mayberry’s voice interacted with the track musically, the contrast of timbres, the rhythmic interplay, that kind of stuff. So to fully explain the feeling the song sparked in me on September 29th, 2015 we’ll have to take a deeper look at the bones of “Keep You On My Side”.
Side B
“Keep You On My Side”
Produced by Iain Cook & Martin Doherty
126 BPM
I know how this looks. I too have read Sasha Geffen’s “Radical Strain”. I can’t just admit to having had a crush on a singer in a band and then claim that her male bandmates are responsible for the architecture of their music without explaining myself. As Geffen pointed out around the time Chvrches were on the rise, music critics are quick to credit the men behind the boards with all of the hard work while reducing women’s contributions to an effortlessness that reaffirms their superficiality. I want to make it clear as possible that I am not trying to do that here. Mayberry’s work as a singer, her phrasing, melodic choices, and vocal inflections are as crucial to Chvrches as anything else. Those contributions don’t happen without a lot of hard work and artistry. But by their own admission, Chvrches’ division of labor during the Every Open Eye sessions had Mayberry in one room working on lyrics and vocal melodies while Cook & Doherty churned out instrumentals in another. Again, both parts of this process are crucial, but when it comes to breaking down “Keep You On My Side” from a drummer’s perspective Cook & Doherty’s contributions are going to come under sharper scrutiny. Cool? Cool.
As far as I can tell Chvrches have never specified which dude is responsible for their drums, but if I had to guess, Doherty’s my guy. I mean, look at that hat. That guy definitely makes beats. Not convinced? In the Sound On Sound article I linked to in the last paragraph, watch on Doherty switches pronouns from “we” to “I” when he starts talking drums. “I want to see ‘‘Here’s my verse, here’s my chorus.’ I find it a much more musical way to write drums” Doherty says, describing the way the band program drum parts. First, they program grooves into a Tempest Analog Drum Machine, then sample chunks of those grooves for each section of the song. This means that every section of the song has a distinct rhythm, but that those rhythms repeat each time that section crops up. So the verses have different drums from the chorus, but the same drums as other verses.
This process highlights two key components of the Chvrches house style: their economy and their love of loops. These two elements go hand in hand. The very first sound you hear on “Keep You On My Side” is two loops, one hi-hat pattern that bubbles under the entire track, and a chopped up sample of Mayberry’s voice, pitched down and looped into a rhythm instrument. Chvrches songs are filled with these kinds of vocal edits that repurpose Mayberry into part of the rhythm section, effectivity killing two birds with one well-recorded stone. “Keep You On My Side” is just as efficient at the level of song structure. There are only three distinct sections in the song, but you might not notice on first listen. Here’s what the song looks like if you plot it out:
A B C B A B C B C B
The As are verses and C is for Chorus. B, however, means something a little different each time it happens. A less simplified version of the map might look like this instead:
A B C B' A B C B'' C B'
Each B has the same chord progression and vocal melody, but through clever arranging Chvrches wring a pre-chorus, a post-chorus, and a bridge out of the same small chunk of material. The pre-chorus strips away the bassline and drums of the verse in order to build tension for the chorus. The post-chorus builds on the explosion of the chorus by adding extra percussion and a dizzying cascade of arpeggios. The bridge removes drums entirely (except for those hats) and gradually builds up to the intensity of the final chorus. That is some remarkably tight songwriting.
Zooming in slightly, Cook & Doherty get a lot of milage out of very minor tweaks between sections. There are plenty of constants in “Keep You On My Side”’s drum part. Every four measures there’s an extra kick drum before the downbeat, and every eight measures ends with a quick 16th note fill. But the fills in each section have their own distinct character, just by changing the order of notes around the kick. They don’t even need to change that much to make the chorus more intense, just two extra accents on the hi-hats does the trick. All of these details make “Keep You On My Side” feel like it is constantly growing and changing without losing track of its identity. They also made the song very easy to memorize. Every part is different so you never get lost, but the changes don’t require a huge work load to sort out. The challenge in learning “Keep You On My Side” came from matching the song’s intensity and locking in with its mechanical precision. It took me five takes, and I’m very happy with the result.
For this video I wore my brand new Stuck t-shirt, because I’m going to celebrate a famous Second Band, why not also celebrate a less famous Second Band. I also hung my Buzz Rickson x William Gibson MA-1 flight jacket in the background because a) the reflective cross on the back paired well with Chvrches’ religious branding b) because “Keep You On My Side” is just dark and synthy enough to qualify as at least cyberpunk adjacent and c) because I wanted to prove to myself that I’ve come a long way from dreading changing rooms in stores as even as low stakes as Target.
For a song Liked on first listen, “Keep You On My Side” has stood the test of time. But does it stand up against the rest of my Liked list? Find out below on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
“Keep You On My Side” is an expertly written piece of music with a superstar vocal performance. Taken in combination the music and vocals express one of my favorite emotions in music: endurance in the face of adversity. Mayberry sings with steely determination even as the song twists into a minor key for the chorus, “staying afloat” in turbulent waters. The song never resolves the tension because when the waves are choppy enough just avoid disaster suffices for its own kind of catharsis. I’ll have a lot more to say about the music that inspires this feeling in me next week, but usually songs that evoke this resolve aren’t as immediate and dance-floor-ready as “Keep You On My Side”. That’s a real accomplishment and I’m grateful for it.
Where “Keep You On My Side” stumbles in the specifics of its lyrics. In their review of Every Open Eye for Consequence, Sasha Geffen describes Chvrches lyrics as “breakup song Madlibs” and singles out “Keep You On My Side” in particular for reusing metaphors from the first Chvrches record. I get the sense that Mayberry and co. wrote lyrics at the time with more care for how they sounded on record than for how they scanned on a page. In an interview with Song Exploder Mayberry mentions reworking lyrics so that the vowel sounds fit better with the arc of her melodies. Some people call this process “melodic math”, although it has the paradoxical effect of rendering lyrics less precise than they’d be otherwise. The lyrics sound good, but at the cost of poetic specificity or bold choices. In the case of “Keep You On My Side” the melodic math adds up to cliches and generalities. The feeling is still strong, but it fades quickly after the song ends.
As a piece of craft Chvrches earn high honors, but for now they remain just outside of the top 10, at number 11 below clipping and above Alcest. They’ll have two more shots at higher marks. See DU#30 for more.
Thank you for reading. Next week is the “season one finale” of Drumming Upstream. It’ll be the last song I’ll learn before 2023. The rest of November and the first three weeks of December will be dedicated to closing the door on 2022, featuring my take on Spotify Wrapped, and roundups for my favorite movies, books, and games that I engaged with this year. See you then, hope you have a nice week.
I once had the opening riff to “Delial” stuck in my head for so long that I convinced myself that I wrote it. Wish I had!
Not a joke. Incidentally, this is also why I like Beach House way more than some of my friends. “This sounds like an H&M”, if you say so!