Florence + the Machine - Lungs
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CD Details
Artist: Florence + the MachineEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2009-10-20
Music Label: Universal Republic
Soundtracks:
- Dog Days Are Over
- Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
- I'm Not Calling You A Liar
- Howl
- Kiss With A Fist
- Girl With One Eye
- Drumming
- Between Two Lungs
- Cosmic Love
- My Boy Builds Coffins
- Hurricane Drunk
- Blinding
- You've Got The Love
Music reviews of Lungs
Music Review: Welcome to Florence + the Machine
Rating: 5 Stars
I first heard Florence + the Machine on YouTube, the home of the music video ever since Mtv became the home of inane "reality" shows. I think I must have played the videos I could find by this band ten or more times in a row. Ever since the divine Kate Bush stopped releasing albums on a bi-yearly pace (she now is on the decade-release schedule, along with Peter Gabriel), I've been missing this kind of sound: a strong voice that can span octaves who understands dynamics and has a decent production that mixes simple piano lines with driving beats and layers of overdubs that don't muddy the whole thing but give it a sense of unrestrained joy. That's about as good a description as I can give you of "Dog Days Are Over," which starts off slow with some kind of repetitive plucked string instrument (mandolin?) and Florence Welch's soft vocal, then adds handclaps, piano chords, and harp, and builds with a great bass beat, as the vocal builds in both intensity and adds an overdubbed background vocal choir. Halfway through it calms again, to catch its breath, then hits again at full steam. It's a great song, even if I have no idea what the lyrics are actually about.
And that first song isn't even as good as the next song, "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)," which combines the better parts of Bush, Sarah McLachlan, and Loreena McKennitt in a lush song picture. This is the kind of experimental rock music I yearn for, especially that break right around the one minute mark where it breaks into a huge chorus with multiple voices (or, more likely, simply overdubs by Florence). The verses have this interplay between the lead vocal and a responsive background chorus, similar to some of the songs on the back side of Hounds of Love. Yes, I can't stop comparing these songs to Kate Bush, and there's no better recommendation I can make than that. Other songs in this vein include "Drumming," "Cosmic Love," "You've Got the Love," and "Binding" (the drum part in this one, in particular, reminds me of "Running Up That Hill").
Listening to the album from the beginning, it would be easy to think that Florence was simply going to be Kate Bush-like, but there's enough variance on this album to showcase her own style. "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" is more bluesy, albeit by the way of some blues that invoives a harp and a piano instead of a steel guitar. Even more bluesy is "Girl with One Eye," which uses just guitar and drums along with Florence's vocals. The nice thing about this song, however, is that it does the soft, loud, soft thing that the first couple of songs did. "Hurricane Drunk" and "Howl" have traces of hip-hop, or at least modern R&B, in its delivery, although the vocal delivery and instrumentation are strictly this nouveau folk experience that I assume is Florence's assimilation of the last three decades of female singer-songwriters. "Kiss with a Fist" sounds like an outake from KT Tunstall's debut album, replacing all that folk sound that I've been going on about above with a guitar + drums sound that's more White Stripes, including a fuzzy feedback-laden guitar solo. This song seems to have been somewhat controversial, as the lyrics seem to describe a domestic violence situation and comes close to celebrating it, rather than providing the politically correct statement.
Overall, this is the strongest album I have heard in the last ten years. Every song has power, either in Florence's strong vocals or through the unique combination of multi-vocal choirs and acoustic rhythms (handclaps and punctuated piano chords, mostly), unlikely pairings of traditional and modern sounds, and a focus on using variance as a part of the music. That is, songs will start soft and become loud, or switch midstream between slow and fast. It's so unusual in these days of mastering everything to 11 that songs which even have soft sections like this come across as an innovation (whereas it was a prominent feature of pretty much ever progressive rock album in the 70s).
Description of Lungs
UK LP pressing. 2009 debut album from the hotly tipped UK outfit fonted by Florence Welch. Lungs, produced by Paul Epworth, James Ford and Steve Mackay, is an intoxicating mix of delicate fragility, dark humor and twisted Tim Burton style fairy-tales. From the live favourite 'You've Got The Love' to the raw Blues-tinged 'Girl With One Eye' to the beautifully painful 'Between Two Lungs', the album is crammed with crowd pleasers. Also boasting fresh tracks like new single 'Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)', 'Drumming' - with its epic denseness, the terrifyingly brilliant 'Howl' and 'Hurricane Drunk' with it's paradoxical charms of heartbreak, love and loss, Lungs promises to leave us wanting more of the insanely captivating Florence Welch. Universal. 2009.Alternative Rock CDs
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