Florence and the Machine perform at Toronto's Mod Club, Nov. 2, 2009.Della Rollins
Ceremonials
- Florence + the Machine
- Island Records
The romance of the big voice works on people in every kind of music. Something about a real ear-filling vocal sound sells us, however briefly, on what we might call the big-voice fallacy: the notion that any feeling becomes deeper or more real when sung to the outer limit. It applied to Whitney Houston when she insisted tutta forza that she would always love you, and to Luciano Pavarotti when he capped many a mediocre performance of Puccini's Nessun dorma with a winner-take-all swipe at the final high note.
Florence Welch has a huge voice, and it helped propel the flame-haired English singer and her band from zero to pop stardom in just two years. Welch's dramatic costuming, high-intensity stage presence and air of heedless, rushing-over-the-moors Romance have all sped her ascent.
Of course only the audible parts of that package can fit into Welch's latest CD, best heard perhaps while contemplating the singer's swoony, Pre-Raphaelite image on the cover. Ceremonials is very conscious of itself as a second album from a performer known for outsized expression: The songs, arrangements and production style make a nearly continuous argument for the supreme truth of bigness.
Welch's debut disc Lungs fashioned a lumpy and sometimes arresting quilt from scraps drawn from old-style English folk traditions, punkish rock, Celtic pop, vintage soul and a kind of maximal drumming that might have seemed African if it weren't so primitive. Ceremonials is more uniform in style, and that's not necessary a virtue. Much of the album presents an indistinct terrain formed from songs that depend on oversized mainstream chorus-mongering. The uplifting All This and Heaven Too epitomizes the tone, working up a resonant storm of strings and voices while treading water melodically. The banal Shake It Out, No Light, No Light and Spectrum all follow this pattern, and all go on too long, as if achieving transcendence were just a matter of hanging in there.
The best songs break from this dreary model. Breaking Down is a tightly-written, one-off venture in chunky vintage pop, with catchy melodies in verse and chorus and a breeziness that doesn't exist anywhere else on the disc. Leave My Body has a bluesy feeling that veers towards gospel as the backup chorus comes in, with its exhortations to move "up to higher ground."
Lover to Lover explores a darker, vintage soul idiom, over a backing of stiff-fingered piano, handclaps, moody organ and syncopated bass. The stark Seven Devils goes a similar route in its arresting verses, levelling out into a more pop-friendly style in the chorus.
What the Water Gave Me foregrounds the folkish side of Welch's music, in its ageless-sounding chorus melody. The lyrics hint at a watery suicide à la Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare's Ophelia, as portrayed in John Everett Millais's Pre-Raphaelite portrait.
Water and air are Welch's symbolic elements, just as earth and fire belong to another current singer with huge pipes and a big Romantic streak: Amy Lee of Evanescence, whose recent self-titled album has a kind of titanic solidity when set next to Ceremonials. Lee's American gothic spirit is grittier than the diaphanous ethos of Welch, and her songwriting is generally sturdier. Nothing on Ceremonials can offer the punch of What You Want, the first single from Evanescence.
Welch is the more subtle performer, however, capable of veering from a full cry to a soft coo in a single phrase. Her potential remains huge, in part because this album doesn't deliver the knockout blow that many of us hoped for.
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