Lauren Mayberry is terrific – but it’s not music for middle-aged men

There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly cold Monday night in Philadelphia, Lauren Mayberry – over from Glasgow, and halfway through a month of criss-crossing the USA – took to the stage to survey a crowd of maybe 500 people, in a venue that holds 1,200.

A good proportion of those 500 people were just like me: middle-aged men. We have every right to be there, of course, and one suspects Mayberry was glad they bought tickets. But I bet she was disappointed some of the remaining 700 or so tickets had not been bought by young women, for this is who this show is for.

Mayberry’s day job is as singer for the Scottish trio Chvrches – pronounced Churches – and this tour was to promote her first solo album, Vicious Creature, which sounds very much like an album written with young women in mind rather than old men. ‘I wish you would stop calling me every time/ You need validation for the qualities you want to hide’, she sang on the opening ‘Crocodile Tears’. Had that lyric been written for middle-aged men, it might more plausibly have been: ‘I wish you would stop yourself from calling me every time/ You’ve forgotten how to programme the thermostat so the heat comes on in the morning.’

Vicious Creature treads similar emotional ground to Self Esteem’s breakout album Prioritise Pleasure. ‘Sorry Etc’ even appears to share Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s anger at how band life treats women: ‘I killed myself to be one of the boys/ I lost my head to be one of the boys/ I bit my tongue to be one of the boys/ I sold my soul to be one of the boys.’

It was not, though, a rageful show. Backed by two musicians and a fair few gigabytes of backing tapes, Mayberry was charming and charismatic – plainly her voice was double- tracked at times, but she was also obviously singing. A cover of the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ was fabulously potent, if evidently unfamiliar to most of the crowd. It will bring the house down when she tours the UK later this spring. The rest of the set was simply the album, in full, but it was strong enough that the show never dragged. You want sparkly electro pop? Have ‘Change Shapes’. Fancy a Robbie Williams-ish ballad? Try ‘Something in the Air’. Jerky art pop? That will be ‘Punch Drunk’. It was terrific – go to see the UK shows, which I suspect will be fuller.

Curiously, Mayberry was louder than Thou. Curious because Thou play extreme metal, and their album Umbilical was one of last year’s triumphs. Which particular micro-variety of extreme metal they are I will leave to those who can differentiate their blackened doom from their grindcore. Suffice to say that their music proceeds at a slow and monstrous plod, with singer Bryan Funck growling unintelligibly in the accepted style of black metal, and occasionally staring blank-eyed at the back wall of the room – a Johnny Rotten taken beyond anger into apathy.

I realise I am not making Thou sound terribly attractive, but the appeal of music such as this in a club is almost entirely physical: it is monolithic, unyielding and overwhelming. Often, at these kinds of shows, I spend the first ten minutes wondering why I chose to come, before the narcotic effect of the immense slabs of noise kicks in and I realise I am nodding my head in a half-daze. And so it was with Thou.

Charming and charismatic, Mayberry was terrific – go to see the UK shows

The quintet, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana – home to the equally unbiddable Eyehategod – play a music so stripped back it’s like looking at a car chassis rather than the fully upholstered vehicle a normal band offers. Yes, there are two guitars, bass and drums, being played with full force, but there is no concession to self-indulgence: almost no guitar solos; drums and bass in lockstep, thudding with an almost dubby intensity.

I’m not going to dwell on the lyrics. Partly because I couldn’t hear any of them, and partly because, having looked them up, I am not sure they will necessarily help my case that Thou are truly a great band. There’s only so much ‘Kneel before the empty tomb/ I am the scourge, I am the open wound’ one can quote with a straight face.

Not that you really needed the lyrics to parse the meaning of the music: life is really not very nice, so here’s something physically painful to remind you of the fact. Unmelodic, uncompromising, unattractive and wonderful.