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T The myth of the tortured artist is prior to pop music of a few hundred years or less. The idea that significant art is forged in a crucible of suffering will most likely survive as a concept, even when all the successes to which we rebound are fully generated by algorithms. What happens when a queen of the drama longs for a little peace?
Over the last decade, Florence Welch has been one of the best British posters for the event – for grief and abandonment and a kind of too much femininity An impression only magnified by the power of his lungs. One of the few contemporary female artists whose voices are instantly visible, Welch's instrument could turn a glamor into a national security issue with a single exhalation.
Fortunately, she is even better when it is important. Hunger, the unusual song released in front of High As Hope her fourth studio album, reveals Welch's teenage eating disorder, how she confused her hunger for love with the " kind of void "induced by famine. We all have an inner void, she concludes. Biting about it helps – not just Welch, but anyone affected by the issues raised.
You can actually see Welch's previous decade of work as repeated glances in the void, via the stormy interaction of air and water. chest, floating hair and floating dresses that increase Florence's galloping etherealness + Machine music. This elemental power was offset by all drownings: female aquatic suicides such as those of Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, referenced in What the Water Gave Me of 2011. The tide rose so high that its last producer, Markus Dravs, would have banned Welch from writing on the water. Yeah, right: the result was an album called How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful .
High As Hope still has the wet patch and does not lack oxygen: references to skyscrapers, and overproduced choirs see this. There are heavens full of songs. The first song featured in the album, however, Sky Full of Song – released on Record Store Day – actually finds Welch the storm hunter demanding to be brought back to earth. We already had potting soil in Florence + the songs of Machine ("Pull the earth around me to make my bed" – Ship to Wreck) but never a desire for banality.
"I fly too long," She sings, begging someone to grab her ankles. High As Hope remains an album of Florence Welch, with all the gale force vocals that accompany it, but here Welch tries to continue the opposite of the storm: the calm. What's an artist known for entering the glass doors will sound like it's more anchored?
"It's hard to write to be happy," she sings a cappella on No Choir, the amazing closing song. "No Chorus can come only about two people doing nothing." No Choir is, without question, one of the most touching songs in the album: Just Welch, doing nothing with someone and thinking about how to create a meaningful art. "Oh darling, things were so unstable but for a moment we could be motionless," she sings, and you want to hit the air a little bit. If this album suffers slightly from a lack of bangs – the concept of empowerment, 100 Years, actually catching up, never finding an air – it wins significantly small "meta" moments like this, or when, on a song called The End of Love, Welch sings to see the title on a sign in a dream, and how to sing about it would make a good line for a song.
In interviews, Welch detailed how she stopped drinking some time ago, in an effort to equalize. High As Hope was written largely in Peckham, south of London, near the singer's house, with Welch apparently cycling up to the studio. Plus was added to Los Angeles (with co-producer Emile Haynie) and New York, with performances by artists as diverse as Kamasi Washington (multiple sax and brass arrangements) and Londoners like Jamie xx (helped by Big God) and Sampha (co-writes and sings on Grace). In the meantime, his sister had a baby: super-grounding, though to a removed from Welch herself. Welch called, read books, nurtured his art, and wrote poetry, some of which will be included alongside the lyrics in his next book, Useless Magic that comes out in July.
Welch could never be accused of being an impersonal artist, but a good fate of High As Hope is not just personal but direct. Grace, that of her little sister, strives to make amends by apologizing for having ruined her birthdays and being too dependent. On this, Welch also wonders if she would make the pride of his mother by returning to the university: not your usual pop label.
The music could benefit from a periodic test of Bechdel: here, Welch would pass it with flying colors with not one, but two songs about other women. Patricia is a song for an idol, "North Star" by Patti Smith – Welch – about the "doors" that are "open to the believer".
If none of them is likely to be sung at the top of his lungs in a future Glastonbury, Welch has a residual dose of drama in his kimono sleeve. Beginning with minor piano chords, and made majestic by the Washington horns, Big God is one of those Welch songs that resonate in the pit of his abdomen, rather than escaping from his chest . In addition to her usual swoops and whoops, here Welch screams, breathes and creaks like a rusty door – and it sounds good. The singer has joked Big God like a song about unanswered text messages, but it sounds both harder than that ("You need a big God, big enough to fill you up" – and more) . Although Welch does not cry a river like a metaphorical screamer, here the truth serves him well. "Jesus Christ, it hurts," she croaked.
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