Chasing the Skyline with "Playing Dead" by Chvrches
Drumming Upstream 30
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 449 songs to go!
This week I learned “Playing Dead” by the Scottish synth-pop trio Chvrches. This is the second Chvrches song that I’ve covered in Drumming Upstream, following “Keep You On My Side” (DU #20). Feel free to refresh your memory, this entry builds on that one.
With that out of the way, let’s play “Playing Dead”.
Side A
“Playing Dead”
By Chvrches
Every Open Eye
Released on September 25th, 2015
Liked on September 29th, 2015
Chvrches are a band. This is an irrefutably true statement. Google their name and you will find pictures of three members, one over the minimum requirement for being a band and not a solo project. That their music is made on synthesizers instead of guitars makes this fact no less true. However, when they emerged onto the scene with their debut album The Bones of What You Believe the Scottish trio weren’t content to rest on the basis facts alone. They wanted their audience to consciously think of them as a band as point of ethics.
“We could have sold 200,000 more albums if we’d hidden Iain [Cook] and I from view and put Lauren [Mayberry] on the cover of every magazine,” Martin Doherty, told The Guardian in 2015, a month before the release of Chvrches’s sophomore follow up Every Open Eye. “We ended up doing it in an indie band style. We broke through via word of mouth. It was about doing it in an honest, right way.”
Despite their efforts to appear as a united front, Chvrches could not prevent the public from singling out singer Lauren Mayberry from the lineup. Call it the Blondie Curse, a woman singing in an otherwise all male band risks being taken for a pop star. It is an unfortunate tendency, rooted in both the magnetism of the human voice and the cultural perception of pop music as “girl stuff”. While not without its benefits (it certainly doesn’t hurt your accessibility if people think you have a solo artist’s charisma) one edge of the Blondie Curse is distinctly sharper than the other. The attention that Mayberry found herself at the center of was loud and often boorish even when it wasn’t outright malicious. It may still be as bad for all I know, but the scale of grody dude-vomit precipitated by the rise of social media was still novel in the early 2010s.
Eventually Mayberry reached her breaking point. She called out the worst offenders on the band’s social media, shut down crush-stricken hecklers at shows, and penned an essay for The Guardian in 2013 calling for a public reckoning with what women in music have to put up with on a daily basis. This defiance in the face of online creepdom ironically only served to further cement Mayberry as the face, voice, and soul of Chvrches. By taking a public stand Mayberry joined the wave of pop feminism1 that rose across the internet in the early years of the last decade. Chvrches now stood for something bigger themselves.
Though it differed very little from the band’s debut on a stylistic level, Every Open Eye could not help but arrive through the lens of this new persona. In this light, lyrics that may first have only been read as break-up salvos now glittered with the allure of political significance. In his review of Every Open Eye for AV Club, Kyle Ryan singled out “Playing Dead”, the album’s 9th track, as a possible response to online harassment. Nothing in the lyrics makes that connection literal, as usual Mayberry is light on specifics, but it isn’t hard to see why Ryan made the connection. “Playing Dead”, a mid-tempo track powered by a rumbling electric bass line, is certainly about standing strong in the face of something. But the source of that opposition is tantalizingly vague.
Ryan wasn’t the only writer to pluck lyrics out of the song in a review. In particular, contemporary reviews liked to quote the line “I’m chasing the skyline much more than you ever will” from the song’s second verse. Some publications used the quote to praise the band’s ambitions and affirmations, others criticized it as an example of “Millennial Successorizing”. It doesn’t surprise me that this line jumped out to other writers because it also jumped out to me when I first heard “Playing Dead”. That single line says a lot about the Chvrches lyrical style at large. It suggests a powerful feeling, doesn’t quite make logical sense, and addresses someone that Mayberry holds in total contempt. However, when I Liked “Playing Dead” the line felt far more literal to me than I imagine its author intended.
I’ve mentioned a few times in this series that in 2015 I logged a good chunk of my music listening while jogging in my neighborhood in Chicago. Chicago is geographically a very flat city. This makes it a good place for an aspiring runner to get their legs under them. Chicago’s lack of elevation also makes it easy to spot the downtown skyline, chiefly The Tower Formerly Known As Sears, for long stretches of the city. The second longest leg of my route was one such stretch, along West Cermak from Ashland to Halsted. Running east, I could look to my left and see The Tower over the artificial horizon, drawing just slightly closer with every step. The closest I’d get was at the corner of Halsted and 16th Street where I’d turn west for the last and longest leg of my route.
Running to heavy metal is psychotic and rap always felt a hair too slow for my stride, so I settled on electronic music as my goldilocks solution. Generally I preferred dance music (DU#7), but vocal-forward synth-pop like Chvrches could more than do in a pinch. I can’t remember if “Playing Dead” ever scored that exact stretch of Cermak, but I certainly ran to the song.
In their review of Every Open Eye, The Guardian saw the title of the song, and maybe its The Cure2-style bassline, as a “turn to the goth”. I agree, only on the condition that we amend “goth” with the prefix “health”. Maybe it’s the choppy “go!” sample that starts the song, or Mayberry starting each verse with personal trainer platitudes like “no more excuses/no more playing dead” and “no more distractions and no more staying still”, but the song pairs great with exercise. When I Liked the song, which is to say when I first heard it, the first phrase that popped into my head was “training montage”.
There are musical reasons that I made that connection (and we’ll get to them soon on Side B) but those occurred to me on a subconscious level. What floated to the top of my mind through the filter of Mayberry’s Katnis Everdeen-worthy toughness was a memory of seeing the trailer for the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Enough while watching TV with my older sister in 2002. Listening to “Playing Dead” I instantly recalled my sister summing up Enough’s plot, in which Jennifer Lopez learns Krav Maga to defend herself from her abusive husband, as “typical girl power stuff”. Since my sister is exactly split between Generation X and Millennial culture I could not tell, then or now, whether she said this as a sincere endorsement or an ironic dismissal.
“Playing Dead” offers a lower stakes version of the same feeling my sister was responding to in the Enough trailer. The song is about finding the strength to move beyond someone who is holding you back. You don’t need to be literally fighting for your life to not want to feel dead. The song could very well apply to moving on from a crummy job or a more mundane ex. Heck, it could apply to overcoming yourself, leaving behind an inadequate version of yourself one city block at a time on the road to greater heights.
By the time they released Every Open Eye, Chvrches had shed the version of themselves concerned with doing things the “honest, right way”. Doherty and Cook sat out the music video for the album’s first single “Leave A Trace”, leaving Mayberry to carry the stage herself. For their third album Love Is Dead, they left all pretenses of rock-band-ness behind, working with outside writers and collaborating with edgeless-EDM impresario Marshmello. The results of openly go-go-go-going for it like this probably didn’t live up to Chvrches’ expectations. No one seems to like Love Is Dead very much. Even replacing Doherty’s backing vocals with the indie baritone gravitas of The National’s Matt Berninger couldn’t cover up the album’s middlebrow ambitions. Chvrches wisely course-corrected on 2021’s Screen Violence, bringing back the goth rock accents their music and lyrics lacked on Love Is Dead. But by now Chvrches have none of the mystery of a band on a verge of developing a persona. They are a known entity. That’s the problem with chasing the skyline, once you catch it you no longer get to be the underdog.
Side B
“Playing Dead”
Produced by Iain Cook & Martin Doherty
93 BPM
Time Signature: 4/4
What is it about “Playing Dead” that made me immediately classify it as training montage music? We’ve already covered how the Mayberry’s lyrics influenced this interpretation, but what about Doherty & Cook’s production? I grew up in the United States of America in the late 20th century, so all of my preconceptions about training montages come from the long cultural impact of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky. Even though I didn’t see Rocky itself until fall 2015, around the same time I Liked “Playing Dead” and in the preparation for the release of Creed3, I’ve been familiar with its iconic moments and equally iconic main theme since childhood.
On the surface “Gonna Fly Now” and “Playing Dead” hardly resemble each other. “Gonna Fly Now”, with its interlocking horns and strings backed by a laid back rhythm section, is informed by Philly Soul. Whereas, true to its roots in the British Isles, “Playing Dead” sounds like The Human League with an Equinox membership. But despite their different origins the two feature similar musical DNA. Both tracks are roughly the same tempo, “Gonna Fly Now” clocks in at 95 BPM, and both songs avoid the stable resolution of traditional pop writing for a tense rise-and-fall that better captures the stakes of their subjects. Conti doesn’t have to worry about a lead vocal, so his composition can move through more harmonic territory without losing its melody. Doherty & Cook on the other hand had to write with Mayberry’s voice in mind, so they keep “Playing Dead” compact and lean. This is both to the song’s benefit and its ultimate undoing.
As we covered on the entry about “Keep You On My Side”, the songwriting process for Every Open Eye relied on a strict division of labor. Doherty & Cook cranked out instrumentals in one room of the studio while Mayberry wrote lyrics and vocal melodies to those instrumentals in another. Just like in actual industrial production, this division of labor necessitates adherence to a formula in order to be efficient.
If you spend enough time with the songs on Every Open Eye it becomes clear what the Chvrches assembly line is optimized for. Like any good pop writers, Doherty & Cook put a lot of work into their choruses, and clearly put comparable effort into writing complimentary verses. The duo have a knack for sampling Mayberry’s voice and chopping it into smaller hooks for intros and transitional material. By focusing just on these three types of sections, Chvrches can put together complete-seeming songs quickly and then figure out the finer details later. These priorities result in songs with finely crafted components but big pictures that seem to be missing something under close enough inspection.
The drums that Doherty4 cooked up for “Playing Dead” tell the whole story, showing us Chvrches’ attention to detail and what they’re willing to overlook. In the verses the drums stay sparse, letting Mayberry’s voice and Cook’s bass fill up the empty space. Still, Doherty sneaks in enough details (splashing hi-hats, extra kicks, a short snare fill) to keep the groove from getting stale.
Things get busier in chorus. Here Doherty adds a pulsing hi-hat pattern that splashes open on the off beats. This is an old disco move, but I first came across this kind of beat when I tried learning “Sober” by Tool back in high school. The kick pattern also gets busier in the chorus, but not without consideration. Doherty wisely leaves out one kick on the + of 3 in the second measure of the chorus. It’s a minor change, but one that gives the section shape.
Where Doherty really shines is the bridge. With no lead vocal to contend with Chvrches go all in on rhythm. The kick pattern gets even busier, the snare fills come more frequently, and above all of it the band throw on an extra layer of syncopated percussion. This part of the song rocks. It gathers all the pent up tension from the verses and choruses and explodes into pure action. Because they don’t have to worry about anyone playing all of these rhythmic layers at once, Chvrches weave these drum parts together with no concern for human anatomy. But just because it wasn’t meant for a human player, that doesn’t mean a human can’t play the part. Allow me to demonstrate.
For this video I decided to lean into the workout theme and wear a shirt from the band Arms that I had cut the sleeves off of a few months ago. That shirt was destined for sleeveless-ness the minute it came off the presses with that band name on it. I considered wearing a headband in a homage to Kevin Huerter of the Sacramento Kings. Then the Kings got the worst of it from Steph Curry. Oh well, I can save that one for Halloween.
You might be wondering why “Playing Dead” took so much longer to show up than “Keep You On My Side” if I Liked them on the same day. The smart sounding answer is that there are a lot of repeat artists in the series5 so for the sake of variety it makes sense to space them out. The blunt truth is that it took me a long time to learn that bridge. My first challenge was figuring out what to do with the harsh digital percussion sound that exclusively happens in the bridge and finale of the song. My solution was to stack my crash on top of my ride, convenient since the song featured no cymbals other than the hi-hat. Next I worked on playing just the stack with my right hand and the kick with my right foot. Unable to make this work by ear, I transcribed the groove and learned the notes incrementally. If you’re also interested in learning this part, shoot me an email and I can send you my transcription. Incorporating my left limbs was comparatively much easier, but I kept finding ways to make it harder for myself by adding in hi-hats and tom hits. Eventually I brought in my left foot to simulate the way the song’s finale combines the chorus and bridge grooves.
Luckily, “Playing Dead” serves as its own motivational anthem. I had no excuse. I couldn’t run from the athletic challenge of playing an inhuman drum part and face Mayberry in the verses without shame. Especially not with the residual image of Jennifer Lopez in Enough floating in the periphery. I’m as proud of learning this bridge part as I am anything in the series thus far.
It’s too bad that the bridge also, uh, kinda breaks the song.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
I want to be clear from the jump that this is not a negative entry of Drumming Upstream. This is a good song! I love the way the vocal melodies in the verse and chorus complement each other. The bass line is sick. The lyrics are the right kind of cheesy. What can I say? I’m a sucker for training montages! And now that I’ve picked it apart and reassembled it with my own hands, I can only tip my own hat to Doherty’s for that bridge drum part.
The problem is that there is nothing else to the bridge but the drum part. Once the rush of the big percussion break wears off, there’s no harmonic momentum to drive the song back to the chorus. Instead the bridge just putters out and the chorus starts up again with no fanfare. The final chorus is also identical to the two before it. Even an extra vocal harmony would have helped make this return feel climactic instead of perfunctory. In both of the Chvrches songs that I’ve covered I’ve noticed this problem. Their verses and choruses are all immaculately well crafted, but they don’t change much over the course of the song. This puts a hard cap on their music’s dynamic range, emotionally and sonically.
As a good but not great song, I’m going to put “Playing Dead” at No.20, below “Black Man” by Stevie Wonder (DU#22) and above “Virginal II” by Tim Hecker (DU#12). Chvrches will have one more shot at the Leaderboard.
The next entry is a sequel three times over, to a song, an album, and a previous entry. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you then.
There’s perhaps no more succinct a snapshot of this moment in pop culture than this interview with Mayberry conducted by Anita Sarkissian of Feminist Frequency.
The Cure will eventually appear in Drumming Upstream.
If it were possible to Like a song on Spotify specifically as it appears in a film, I would have crushed my iPhone with my fist Liking Meek Mill’s “Lord Knows” as it appears in Creed.
I explained my reasoning for why I believe Doherty is responsible for Chvrches drums in DU#20. Besides, Cook is the one playing bass live.
90 artists repeat at least once. 38 artists, including Chvrches, show up three times total.