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Album of the week with Florence and The Machine: Staggering in Memphis

2022-05-13T09:19:07.268Z


Furious, feverish, lots of Fleetwood Mac: Florence Welch tracked down ghosts from the past and banned them with sensational new songs: »Dance Fever« is our album of the week. And: (almost) news from Radiohead.


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Singer Florence Welch

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Autumn de Wilde / Universal Music

Album of the week:

Perhaps the mental interior of the amazing British musician Florence Welch has to be imagined as a grand Victorian mansion.

Attached is a cathedral in which she sings soul and hymns with gospel choirs, and somewhere in the west wing there is also a room furnished like a California hang-out recording studio, with a piano, guitars and lots of soft cushions in warm brown and beige tones.

There she then creates reveling hymns reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac (»The Bomb«) or Bruce Springsteen (»Free«).

But her favorite thing to do is roam the crypt in the basement, where she lies down in a coffin, knocks and rumbles on the inside of the wood, her voice slurring like a demonic zombie girl in a Japanese horror film ("Heaven Is Here") - or with popcorn in sitting in front of the television in a baroque evening dress and watching Coppola's »Dracula«.

Or »Suspiria«.

And then - of course born out of the Corona lockdown in her London apartment - something like "Dance Fever" comes out of it, which forces exactly these stylistic and musical contradictions into one of the best, most adventurous pop albums of the year.

It's as exhilarating as it is depressing, that's what makes it so good.

Welch, 35, describes her fifth album with her band Florence + The Machine as a fairy tale in 14 acts, but as always with the redhead with a penchant for staging herself like a muse from a Raphael painting, there's that a dark twist or two.

Just the frenzy of dancing, that »Choreomania«, to which the album title and a central song refer, is a Renaissance mystery: in the 14th and 15th centuries, people in south-west Germany and Belgium suddenly began to dance ecstatically to the point of exhaustion when not almost to death.

The phenomenon, also known in the past as »Vitus dance«, is attributed to the religious delusion of confronting one's own abandonment with excessive, involuntary dancing.

That's what Welch sings in her Kate Bush-esque electro anthem "Choreomania": "Something's coming/ So out of breath/ I just kept spinning/ And I danced myself to death".

Funnily enough, she wrote the song back in 2019, before the pandemic.

Today it seems to fit perfectly with the state of mind of lockdown.

With black humor, Welch plays with her supposed clairvoyant abilities in »Cassandra«, where she stages herself as a persecuted witch: »I used to see the future and now I see nothing/ They cut out my eyes and sent me home packing«.

It's all very "gothic" and abysmal, again.

In the opening indie rock song »King«, she laments her inner conflict about having decided on art over child and family, in the short gospel interlude »Back In Town« she describes her fate of always going there for her creativity to have to where it hurts: "I came for the pleasure, but I stayed for the pain," sings the woman who provoked her audience in 2009 with a confession of domestic violence on her debut.

"A kiss with a fist is better then none," she sang at the time.

It's easy to forget because her perennial, pious smash "You've Got The Love," a cover of an '80s soul and dance track, always outshines everything else.

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Not for the first time, Welch's urge to create is cloaked in divine inspiration, feverish prayers channeled from heaven (or hell, who knows).

Here she brings together Peggy Lee's finger-snapping "Fever" lasciviousness with urban Massive Attack flow in the »Prayer Factory«.

"My Love," produced by Glass Animals singer Dave Bayley, is later the electrifying "You've Got The Love" update, though the divine love in it is gone now;

it's about the writer's block that Welch was also suffering from during Corona.

The groove is still right.

But the dance tracks are scarce on this album, which is less disco deliverance than an intimate portrait of a complicated female character who confronts the many evil spirits of the past that haunt her pop queen's castle, armed with some of the best songs of her career: "Dream Girl Evil," a vibrant homage to Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain," proudly celebrates her inability to be a lovely sweetheart.

The sour »Girls Against God« seems to reappraise painful MeToo experiences from the noughties.

And the beautifully droning final ballad "Morning Elvis" describes how she once, addicted to rock 'n' roll excess, was too drunk to make a planned visit to Elvis Presley's villa: "I never made it to Graceland," sings her, not "walking in Memphis," but staggering.

"Every song became an escape rope, tied around my neck, to pull me up to heaven," she sings macabrely in the ghost train song "Heaven Is Here."

Crazy, sexy, cool.

(9.0)

Listened briefly:

The Black Keys - »Dropout Boogie«

Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney may just be one-trick ponies from Akron, Ohio, but they're also clever: In the video for their excellent single "Wild Child," they go back to school as cleaners "to protect their blue-collar roots to rediscover," as Carney puts it.

They are treated rather roughly by the black and Hispanic teachers: "You're late," says a black lady, "Welcome to hell," a giant guy, perhaps a representative of the many black blues musicians whose music the Black Keys in quoted in their 20-year career and have celebrated worldwide success with it.

Very funny.

The two musicians armed themselves against any accusations of cultural appropriation with their spirited tribute album for the heroes of Mississippi Hill Country Blues last year,

muddy

grooving to the time before their pop-hybrid hit album »Brothers«.

ZZ-Top guitarist Billy Gibbons also joins in on one song of this crisp half-hour of white-bread blues;

John Lee Hooker would nod benevolently to "For The Love of Money" - and a bit of soul from Auerbach's producing job and the years with Danger Mouse remained ("It Ain't Over").

The Black Keys only have one trick, but after a refreshing exercise in musical humility they master it better than ever.

(7.6)

Moderate – »More D4ta«

It also takes almost 30 minutes until the one redeeming electropop tune on Moderat's new album comes: In »Undo Redo«, singer Sascha Ring wanders through shady, empty malls and wants to erase the past.

The accompanying music pushes noises through compressors, modem sounds whine and groan, beats stumble over themselves like zombies.

For five years it was quiet around the Berlin electronics stars Ring (Apparatus), Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary (Modeselektor), their last sign of life was a triumphant performance in Wuhlheide in front of 17,000 people in September 2017. One had thought they would stop, when the project has gotten bigger.

But now the largely spherical comeback, reduced to thoughtful ambient etudes, follows.

»More D4ta« is of course an acronym of the band's name, the 4th, well, the fourth album.

Rave is rare on this collection of dystopian murmuring and crackling lockdown echoes, which sometimes deal with doom scrolling and data collection mania on the Internet in a too solemn and fatalistic way.

But the recently deceased electronic pioneer Klaus Schulze would probably be proud of his hipster heirs.

(7.5)

The Smile - »A Light For Attracting Attention«

It could easily have been sold as a new Radiohead album.

Because what Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood release here as the debut of their new side project The Smile isn't that radically new and different.

Maybe they just wanted to play music with London jazz drummer Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet) (poor Philip Selway!).

The singer and guitarist are also accompanied by wind and strings from the London Contemporary Orchestra.

"The Same" sounds almost mockingly like classic 21-century Radiohead, but in "The Opposite" Skinner is allowed to set a tricky breakbeat.

"You Will Never Work in Television Again" rumbles against monsters like Jeffrey Epstein and rumbles back to the band's '90s, as does the stunningly straightforward ballad "Free in The Knowledge."

The lyrics of the mostly atmospherically cloudy, foreboding, sometimes dub-heavy songs (»The Smoke«) are about environmental destruction, information overkill (»Speech Bubbles«), the current doom and gloom stuff.

Produced, of course, by Radiohead intimate Nigel Godrich.

It's always enough for a smile out of line.

(7.9)

Kat Frankie - "Shiny Things"

Speaking of Radiohead: many of the songs on Kat Frankie's excellent fourth album sound like their »Ok Computer« era.

The last album by the Australian-born Berliner was already impressive, an energetic display of her talent as a singer and songwriter.

Four years later, she boils everything down to a concentrated, exciting and captivating half hour, which above all confidently places her often plaintive, resonant voice far into the foreground ("Love").

But otherwise there isn't much that's OK here, because the politically charged lyrics deal with capitalist exploitation, war, populists (»The Sea«), white privilege (»Spoiled Children«) and gentle revolution (»Be Like Water«).

Like a mermaid digging and pondering in the depths, Frankie observes the tidal range of the zeitgeist,

She protects herself from despair and starvation of the soul with the warming hippie optimism inherent in her embracing song arrangements.

On the cover of the album, a dove of peace sits on her shoulder.

Is that more dramatic pop or already prog rock?

Probably both.

"Road Movie" cites the 1969 James Gang classic "Collage" as well as the sinister grunge of the Screaming Trees, as if Kat were Frankie Mark Lanegan's sister in a mood of melancholy.

(7.8)

Source: spiegel

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