Simply earlier than the pandemic, Florence Welch examine choreomania, the medieval European “dancing plague,” whereby hordes of individuals would flail and twitch till they reached exhaustion, damage, or loss of life. Welch turned obsessive about the idea. Coming into her mid-30s, almost 15 years right into a profession that started when she drunkenly sang to her future supervisor in a membership rest room, she wished to prod at her relationship to efficiency. When she began releasing data, her stadium-shaking voice and songs that crescendoed to catharsis lifted her into the pop charts alongside Adele and Bruno Mars. 4 albums in, although, Florence and the Machine is an establishment, and Florence Welch, the particular person, appeared rattled by how a lot she relied on it. She conceived her fifth album, Dance Fever, as a “‘watch out for what you want for’ fable,” she informed the New York Occasions; as she learn extra concerning the dancing that unfold like illness, she thought of what it might be like to surrender performing altogether. After which, per week after she began making the songs that may change into Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, lockdown hit.
From these uncanny origins, the brand new album arrives as a sweeping, grandiose assertion, no much less outsized than Welch’s previous releases however extra inner and lyrically cohesive. The songs concern devils and angels and life and loss of life, however Dance Fever is extra fascinating as a self-interrogation—these are Welch’s most private lyrics, and amongst her most poignant. “Each music I wrote turned an escape rope tied round my neck to tug me as much as heaven,” she rasps on the finish of “Heaven Is Right here,” and that horror at her personal compulsions reverberates all through the album. On Dance Fever, Welch stays trapped indoors, sobbing into bowls of cereal at midnight, attempting to consolation herself with the crumbs of her personal picture. She constructed her public persona by beaming the grandest, fiercest feelings out to a crowd; left alone, she turns that depth inward.
In contrast to one other Antonoff-produced pandemic reverie, Lorde’s Photo voltaic Energy, Welch struggles in opposition to the knowledge she seeks to impart; we hear her wrestling with the data she’s acquired, not merely delivering it. She sees herself as a projection, not an individual, and he or she’s terrified by her impulse to self-mythologize. Within the spoken-word part that opens “Choreomania,” she traces the contours of an anxiousness assault: “I’m freaking out in the course of the road with the entire conviction of somebody who has by no means had something truly actually dangerous occur to them,” she says in a crisp monotone. The pandemic is a continuing presence: She sings about her mates getting sick, concerning the pleasure and futility of the mundane. The stakes are excessive, however too usually, she tries to convey the album’s scary-movie sensibilities by contorting her voice right into a howl or a croak. The theatrics distract from the extra satisfying drama, because the picture of an auteur who equates work with price collides with Welch’s makes an attempt at intimacy.
