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Island | genius.com |
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I was going to write about Florence’s new album, High as Hope, but my thoughts have already been written. While perusing Katherine St. Asaph’s review on Pitchfork, I found every opinion that had crossed my mind expanded upon, then boiled down to a tepid 5.7. I would quibble at the decimal, but the point stands. Florence’s most recent offering, like the previous one, is just too small for her, and I don’t like it very much.
I fear I may have been a little too mean to CHVRCHES a few weeks ago, and we like to keep it light here at the Ramble. So instead of writing about an album I don’t particularly care for just because it’s new, this week I’m delving back through the archives to an album that appeared from nowhere, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and smashed everything around it to bits.
The debut from Florence and the Machine, Lungs, we will get to in a moment.
Her superlative follow-up, Ceremonials, I have already written about, at great length and with great wit and charm. This towering obsidian treasure earned a prestigious place in my top ten last year, snuggled between the acrylic paint splatters of the Dirty Projectors and the best and bleakest recording of my favourite hairdressing slasher musical Sweeney Todd.
Number three, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was the bare-bones project, stripping out all the gothic bombast to reveal the beating black heart beneath. For many, this strategy helps scrape off the barnacle crust that may have accumulated on overly rested-upon laurels. For Flo, this means negating one of her two great strengths. She is always smart enough to spotlight her voice, her phenomenal hair-raising ear-splitting voice (I’ve already waxed lyric about it, slide on over to those hyperlinks baby) but where previously she supported it within the spacious scaffolding of sturdy cathedrals, or laid upon it the weight of mighty ocean currents, How Beautiful hangs together far more loosely, almost casually. Without the artifice to contain her, Florence surges forth uncontrollably and flattens everything in her path.
She cannot be confined to the profane.
And now on album number four, instead of bouncing back bigger and better, Florence has doubled down on flimsy, gauzy production. She has stuffed herself inside a cursed amulet, or maybe a tarnished golden lamp.
How Beautiful was intermittently diverting, as Florence descended from Mount Olympus in her snuggest bell-bottoms and her squiggliest perm. But on High as Hope, she has kicked off her shoes, slung out an acoustic guitar and announced that she’s about to play ‘Wonderwall’.
Lingering too long in the mortal realm saps that quicksilver ichor from the veins. The Florence of High as Hope is an albatross clipped and caged; a goddess tamed. As St. Asaph so cuttingly put it, “how small, how beige, how disappointing”.
So let’s instead take a trip back to the primordial yesteryear of 2009.
The winds blew fresh and free across the rolling hills of stompy synths, in the general direction of the jagged EDM mountain range looming blue-grey on the horizon. Lady Gaga boasted about the illegibility of her poker face, while that sweet insomniac boy from Owl City illuminated his sleepy world with a gently glowing jar of fireflies. It was a time of beginnings, as Kelly Clarkson resolved that her life would suck without you. And it was a time of endings, as John Mayer daringly engaged in heartbreak warfare.
This was the year Michael Giacchino shattered our collective hearts to pieces with the first ten minutes of Up; the year Art vs. Science toured gay Paris, and thereafter got down with everyone they met.
Southwards, towards the glittering splendour of Versailles, Phoenix were collapsing in paroxysms of Lisztomania, while nearby Vienna Teng spelunked delicately across inland territory.
Westwards, on a distant and somewhat rockier continent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams laid out her antiarchaeological plans to bury the castle brick by boring brick, Mister Mumford’s expedition made first contact with the little lion man and also his sons were there, and Weezer helpfully clarified that, on the off-chance that you’re wondering if they want you to, they do indeed as a matter of fact want you to.
It’s important to establish what the world of music looked like so long ago. We can’t appreciate an album’s place in the history without proper context. We have to know there’s a rulebook before we can tear it up.
This is the landscape in which that kooky witchy Florence appeared one day, the landscape she immediately proceeded to terraform with gale-force winds and driving rains and thunderous storms, all the while idly snacking on plump, juicy little rabbit hearts. Her stylish robes billowed in all sorts of interesting directions — some more promising than others — her excesses justified by the sheer deadly talent of the woman behind them.
It is the hallmark of excellent pop music that everything is the biggest and most important thing that has ever happened to anyone ever. And Lungs is nothing if not excessive in the best way.
A drop of joy is an endless ray of euphoric sunshine emanating from within.
A drop of sadness is perpetual gnashing ash-mouthed misery.
A drop of gin is a raging hurricane of intoxication.
Florence flits between superlatives, a phantom siren, mourning and wailing and shrieking through a broken world governed by ancient potions and blood magicks, where freezing winds tear and church bells toll. A feverish new love manifests as literal lycanthropy on ‘Howl’ — “Drag my teeth across your chest and taste your beating heart” — and a simple separation is the death of the universe itself on ‘Cosmic Love’:
“The stars, the moon /
They have all been blown out /
You left me in the dark
No dawn, no day /
I’m always in this twilight /
In the shadow of your heart”
Yharnam’s greatest pop star threads her music together with the repeated motifs of water and drowning, suggesting some divine Ophelia, risen from a watery grave to hex listeners with bangers such as ‘Heavy In Your Arms’ (“My love has concrete feet / My love’s an iron ball / Wrapped around your ankles / Over the waterfall”) and later on, specifically channelling Virginia Woolf to wade tragically and permanently into the sea on ‘What the Water Gave Me’.
Two prevailing directions asserted themselves from the locus of Lungs. First, the gothic: dramatic strings and wrenching harp glissandi and cataclysmic drumming. Second, the sixties and seventies pop: doo-wops and handclaps and coordinated dance moves.
Florence bakes these into over a dozen different combinations, and Lungs records the first batch of pies she thumbed against the wall. Those that stuck belong by and large to the first category, gravied rabbit hearts and such, while those that slid to the floor include the sweeter rhubarb-feta doo-wops. But on a debut album, such small missteps can be forgiven, chalked up to experimental whim, especially since Florence’s all point in fun, kitchy directions that encourage smirks rather than eye-rolls. The rock-and-roll ‘Kiss With a Fist’ is particularly out of place, while ‘Girl With One Eye’ smoulders duskily not far off. But again, the benefit of hindsight allows us to overlook these errata and appreciate them as necessary false starts and wrong turns on the winding path to greatness. Two years later, Ceremonials would perfect what Lungs so enthusiastically attempted. In 2009, Florence was still cooking.
It is clear from the beginning that Florence, gifted as she is with a prodigious lung capacity and a flair for celestial melodrama, cannot stretch retro pop for the length of a whole album. These flavours work better as diversions, as mid-course sorbets and amuse-bouches, such as the aforementioned banger ‘What the Water Gave Me’, or across the bridge of the ghoulishly delightful ‘Drumming Song’, or indeed opening the album with the whipcrack of ‘Dog Days Are Over’. It was a mistake to wheel the harp away into storage, to fold up that fanatic funereal chorus, and it was a great success to double down on them.
The achievements of the gleaming, monolithic Ceremonials are not to be underestimated, but the raw unpolished edge of Lungs cuts both ways. This album features Florence’s most garish works, alongside some of her blackest. Unexpected fatalism is nestled within the macabre jauntiness of ‘My Boy Builds Coffins’, and the album climaxes on the patient, darkling gem of ‘Blinding’, which shimmers and simmers up a renewal from deep beneath the ground:
“No more dreaming of the dead /
As if death itself were undone /
No more calling like a crow /
For a boy /
For a body in the garden /
No more dreaming like a girl /
So in love /
So in love with the wrong world”
Nobody was doing what Florence was doing. Nobody was gazing towards the stars, nobody mysticising or astrologating. She blazed a trail for the weird and wonderful, and in doing so yanked the equilibrium so far to the left that the negative space she created filled itself almost spontaneously. Lungs begat the goth-pop likes of Halsey and Aurora, and even splashed a vat of night-black dye all over Ellie Goulding that lasted an entire album cycle.
This is the most coveted type of debut: one that leaped into existence more or less fully formed.
Lungs prides itself on its vibrancy and diversity, to be refined rather than retrofitted.
Lungs leaves you breathless.