Everybody Scream by Florence + The Machine
As a singer, Florence Welch combines the fluting melodicism of Linda Thompson, the technical range of Mariah Carey, the entrancing strangeness of Kate Bush and the menacing strangeness of Björk.
With all that brewing inside her lungs and throat, it is no surprise that Everybody Scream, her sixth album fronting the Machine, boils over with modern-rock drama. In songs like “Witch Dance” and “The Old Religion,” the English singer-songwriter explicitly and implicitly casts spells upon the audience.
No mistress of the dark arts can do without subtlety, though, and Welch enlists co-writers and co-producers capable of nuance, including Aaron Dessner, frontman of indie-rock band The National; Mark Bowen, guitarist for the intellectually confrontational postpunk group Idles; and alternative-pop maven Mitski, whose poise is balletic in a way that complements Welch’s operatic scope.
Welch keeps her multitude-containing self at the center of the sacred circle: leaving “blood on the stage” in the opening title track, “only beautiful under the lights” in “One of the Greats,” but definitely not “a romance-novel heroine being swept away” in the finale, “And Love.”
She also sets herself up as “too feminine to function” (“One of the Greats” again), sets herself against the male ego and male creativity (“Music by Men”), and sets herself apart from someone who told her she “would be nothing” by becoming a devouring monster (“Kraken”).
Almost always, whenever Everybody Scream threatens to become solipsistic, it reaches out a hand—or tentacle, or lock of hair—and grips the listener with sheer musical legerdemain like the chimes and Druidic swampiness of “Drink Deep,” the crisp acoustic folk of “Buckle,” and the “November Rain” grandiloquence of “You Can Have It All.”
None of it might hold up without Welch, however, and she sings with the confidence of someone who knows she can be an earth mother or a demi-goddess with just the right change in breath or tone.
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