Even the hopelessly hip crowd that showed up to see Welch at Vice's Creators Project event last month saved one of their biggest ovations for the moment when she held out one piercing note for an exaggerated period of time-- a primal sign of skill that banks on nothing less than sheer audacity.
The same can be said of Florence and the Machine's second album, Ceremonials , which can feel like Welch simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. On paper, the album takes a wise path. After trying out a few different producers and styles-- garage-pop; vampy twinkle-pop; and tribal, mystic-pop-- on her debut, Lungs , Welch settles almost exclusively on the latter for Ceremonials , bringing along producer Paul Epworth, who was so good at the mystic stuff on the first record, to oversee the whole thing.
So what we get is Florence trying very hard to top the gargantuan drums and cascading harps and chest-thumping choruses of Lungs hits like "Cosmic Love" and "Rabbit Heart Raise It Up " on damn near every song. Instead of Lungs ' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.
Some of these world wonders stand tall despite their surroundings. First single "Shake It Out" , a stadium-willing anthem about getting past one's troubles, sets a new high for this group. As does the similarly barreling "No Light, No Light", which is one of the few tracks where Welch sets aside her usual flighty, dreamy, goth-y lyrical go-to's-- ghosts, graveyards, devils, angels, myths, drowning-- for something a bit more personal.
But by the midway point of the LP, its endless crescendos start bleeding into each other, and the loudness soon tires itself out. The few tracks that deviate from the heavens-broken-open formula hardly curb frustrations. The haughty "Breaking Down" could be an outtake from MGMT 's career-stalling Congratulations , dirge-y "Seven Devils" aims for Beelzebub but is about as haunting as a toddler with a pitchfork.
In what's becoming an increasingly annoying problem in this era of iTunes bonus tracks and myriad deluxe editions, it's the extras not included on the proper album that offer reasonable outs for Florence's Big issues. The song's allowed to breathe, and is all the better for it.
Other bonuses include a few demos of some of the record's huger cuts and the term "demo" is relative here-- these stripped-back tracks are still pristine. Backed by only acoustic instrumentation, we finally hear the creases in Welch's voice that the album whitewashes at every turn. Ceremonials is so hell-bent on providing such "bright moments"-- that flash of overwhelming emotion resulting from ramped-up strings or a frantic harp or a particularly audacious vocal run-- that it never zooms out to consider its own listenability.
Welch is 25, and she's likely chuffed at the thought of bringing these massive songs to equally immense crowds at festivals all over the world for the next two years.
And that's where many of these tracks will have the greatest chance to thrive-- in the open, with heads as far as one can see. Or do I want to become more responsible? You know, is it time to grow up? The growing up, happily, is a work in progress. Before clambering into the car photoshoot over, vintage dress for the Wintour party successfully couriered in from the other side of London, a minor emergency about a missing clutch bag solved with a phone call to her boyfriend, confirming he'd be meeting us at the bar to transfer bits and pieces to his pockets , Welch fell into a lengthy discussion with the assistants nearby as to what exactly makes bloody mary the perfect drink.
Vitamins, energy. In the car she's been sitting in an awkward position, a kind of flattened "S" with her back on the flat of the seat and her head jutting up, so as not to crease the silk dress. As we drive within sight of the bar, prominent in the middle of Piccadilly, she lets out a big gasp of relief.
Huge: I can hear it above the noise of the engine. Bloody mary time, I say. She grew up in Camberwell , south London, eldest daughter of parents Evelyn, the art history professor, and Nick, an ad man. Her upbringing was privileged the fact of her going to the fee-paying Alleyn's school invariably gets a mention in profiles, and duly does here but not so exceptional as to spare her the same sludgy skill-sorting everybody goes through.
Florence Welch: good at art; bad at fractions; great in the choir, even if she did get glares during favourite hymns for singing so loudly. In her early teens, Welch's home life underwent an unusual overhaul. Her parents, "always better off as friends", had divorced, and her mum had started a new relationship with a neighbour. When they married, Welch and her two siblings were abruptly melded with this next-door family.
The step-siblings get on well now, she tells me, but at the time "it was mob rule. We had a lot of fights. Later, she remembers a big argument with her mum about those troublesome fractions and thinking to herself: well, at least singing was "something I could do". Going to gigs replaced the witchcraft as a hobby, and sometimes, if the act booked to perform hadn't shown up, Welch would clamber on stage to work up a song.
She learned to crowd-surf. She angles her leg under the dangling lamps to reveal calves spotted with dark marks that have been dulled by concealer. A glittering buckle on her right foot frames an old scar.
I jumped off the bed because a boy I liked had phoned me. He turned out to be my first love, so, I mean, that worked out. But I almost lost the foot. This is the problem with being an exuberant person. And she is, now — an exuberant person. Drinks in, Welch is transformed. Lively, engaged, she reveals a lovely luxurious laugh that punctuates her disconnected confessions on a secret enthusiasm for football: "I'm good at distracting runs" and helps her out of trouble when she can't quite finish a sentence.
This happens maddeningly often, but it's hard not to forgive someone who ties herself into knots trying to give an emotionally complex answer to my emptiest question of the evening: "I think… I think it comes from a real thing of never… Of not really… I don't know, I'm just so … I think it's the way it makes me feel, it's almost… No: I've just never been a tracksuit-wearer.
She's good-humoured, too, about our increasingly absurd situation in the bar. It's a busy, expensively fitted venue with a beautiful ebony bar in its front salon; inevitably, then, it's the sort of place that's got an arbitrary rule forbidding anyone to stand at this wonderful bar with a drink.
Multiple employees tell us this, unreasonably pleased with the prohibition, until it's suddenly waived by a maitre d' who either recognises Welch or recognises that only someone moderately famous would wear such an extravagant frock on a Monday night. Problematically, the fast-moving waiters and busboys turn a blind eye, too, and for more than an hour, as Welch and I chat, we're bullied all over the place.
Alert to the danger of a spillage, Welch has started drinking by bending to her bloody mary from the waist so as not to risk the white silk; her laughter gets louder every time we're interrupted by a missiling tray of Perrier or a barman getting aggressive with his tips tray, and before long we're circling each other while we talk, avoiding staff all but forward-rolling between our legs.
Commandment number five: Wander about a lot. The boy who phoned, I say — the one who caused the bed-jumping and the near mutilation; he was the one she'd end up writing Lungs about?
Not him, says Welch. Lungs was about a boyfriend she got together with around By mid, the relationship was over, and Welch was distraught. With her friend and musical collaborator, the producer Isa Summers, she holed up in Summers's small London recording studio. They'd both been "messed around by boys", Summers has recalled, "and we'd lock the doors and turn the sound system up and listen to Madonna".
They were angry, they were often hungover it was around now Welch woke up as Captain America on a pub roof , and they recorded some career-shaping tracks. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical.
Everything's a big crescendo. It was in the lock-up that the name Florence and the Machine was coined Summers was "the Machine", the term now encompassing the shuffling crew of musicians Welch performs with , and it was here the list of commandments went up on the wall, with its misleading number nine: Be a country singer. Welch was finding a sound for herself at the time, but it wasn't country. I had these folky songs I'd written and recorded, but something wasn't quite right.
Island Records agreed, and signed her up in November By the beginning of , she'd won a Brit award, the critics choice prize given to the new year's most promise-plump artist. Lungs , released in July, went on to sell 3m copies.
On the new album, Ceremonials , one of the standout tracks is an introspective ballad called "Lover to Lover", in which Welch sings about "losing sleep… setting myself up for a fall".
Is that what it's like, I ask, producing a smash album and then trying to do it again? Welch, hunched, sipping, nods vigorously.
And it can feel like I'm definitely gonna manage to completely fuck it up. This is second-album talk. Because it can go either way at this point; look at the example of her contemporaries. Adele's second effort, last spring's 21 , confirmed her as music royalty. Duffy's second, the desperately ho-hum Endlessly , seems to have stunted, if not sunk, a promising career.
You're never completely happy, otherwise you wouldn't ever make the next one. There's just less expectation. She'll be fine with Ceremonials. My nerves, if any, are that fans of Lungs , that great dossier of discontent, must have been fans of its fury, its tartness. And on Ceremonials, Welch sounds really quite chuffed. Track one kicks off with a muffled giggle. By track five's foot-tappy harpsichord twangs, the mood is absolutely jaunty. The video for recent single "Shake It Out" even cast a giddy-looking Florence in the middle of a game of blind man's buff.
Being really desperate for someone. I was definitely in a more settled place for the second, which was helpful for my concentration because I wasn't, like, crying all the time. More settled, in part, because she was back with her chap. She and Stuart, the villain of Lungs , patched things up not long after that album was released. Welch has been very funny, in the past, about the "erm, sorry" moments they went through together as her singles trickled out in and We all know what it's like to make incautious comments about an ex, our own or someone else's, and the awkwardness that follows should that break-up be reversed.
Welch's thoughts on the jilting came blasting out every day on the radio. The crumpled print-out is laid on the bar for close study.
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