Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Florence + The Machine, Polydor 2022.
The supremely talented Florence Welch’s new album Dance Fever highlights her love of drama, passion, and power.
Her impact on the global music scene has been meteoric from the release of her first album Lungs (2009) which jumped straight to #2 on the UK Album Chart and reached number one spending 28 weeks in the charts.
That album broke the then record for the longest stay in the UK Top 40 for a debut album and her dominance was cemented by her follow-up album, Ceremonials (2010), which debuted at #1 in the UK charts and number six in America.
This early success has been replicated with just about every album she has released, setting up very high expectations for each successive album.
The name Florence and The Machine was derived from an in-joke between Florence and her friend and collaborator/multi-instrumentalist Isabella “Machine” Summers.
The rest of the band is comprised of Robert Ackroyd (guitar and vocals), Chris Hayden (drums and vocals), Mark Saunders (bass and vocals), and Tom Monger (harp).
Dance Fever was produced by Florence Welch, Jack Antonoff, and Jack Bayley of Glass Animals fame and it was recorded in London during the pandemic.
Florence describes Dance Fever as a ‘fairy-tale in 14 songs’ and the album explores all the things that Welch missed as a result of lockdowns such as “clubs, dancing at festivals and being in a whirl of movement and togetherness.”
The whirl of excitement and movement pervades the album, which is peopled with a cavalcade of characters: the tragic, the heroic, the flawed and many more.
Welch describes the music and characters as experiencing “Nick Cave in a club”, intriguing but slightly unnerving and dangerous.
There’s more than a dash of Cave’s dramatics in Dance Fever along with influences of ‘70s Iggy Pop, hence the album feels like a marriage between ornate Baroque and Grimm’s Fairy tales.
Dance Fever is an album that you are going to come back to time and again because there’s so much in it.
I’ve written this review after two listens and I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface.
I don’t fully understand it yet, but I love it.
