Antonoff produced most of the first half of the album, and he shares a writing credit on many of those tracks the latter half is largely produced by Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley. Partly this is because of just how disparate these tracks feel, likely as a result of their bifurcated production.
The album sags when it attempts its stated purpose: to celebrate dance itself.
FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE FREE
“If I was free to love you, you wouldn’t want me, would you,” she laments on “The Bomb,” comparing love to literal destruction: collapsing buildings, burning skin. At times, she reaches for profundity and stumbles into hyperbole. “What a thing to admit,” she starts off the lilting, Maggie Rogers-assisted “Girls Against God,” “but when someone looks at me with real love, I don’t like it very much.” Welch stamps these stark admissions throughout the album, little lacerations tucked into the bass and trumpets. “Big feelings” are practically Welch’s brand, but on Dance Fever, she bristles at them. “I feel like to have a child and to let that amount of love in.… I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings,” she told Vogue. Welch’s ambivalence about motherhood is a central theme. “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king,” she howls. She argues with a lover about the endpoints of her ambition, whether art is useless, if she can build a version of motherhood that would mesh into her own mythology. The track chugs along over subdued percussion before it swells into classic, titanic Welch, belting over harp. She examines this tension most strikingly on “King,” the album’s opener. The theatrics distract from the more satisfying drama, as the image of an auteur who equates work with worth collides with Welch’s attempts at intimacy. The stakes are high, but too often, she tries to convey the album’s scary-movie sensibilities by contorting her voice into a howl or a croak. The pandemic is a constant presence: She sings about her friends getting sick, about the joy and futility of the mundane. In the spoken-word section that opens “Choreomania,” she traces the contours of an anxiety attack: “I am freaking out in the middle of the street with the complete conviction of someone who has never had anything actually really bad happen to them,” she says in a crisp monotone. She sees herself as a projection, not a person, and she’s terrified by her impulse to self-mythologize. Unlike another Antonoff-produced pandemic reverie, Lorde’s Solar Power, Welch struggles against the wisdom she seeks to impart we hear her wrestling with the knowledge she’s acquired, not merely delivering it. She built her public persona by beaming the grandest, fiercest emotions out to a crowd left alone, she turns that intensity inward. On Dance Fever, Welch stays trapped indoors, sobbing into bowls of cereal at midnight, trying to comfort herself with the crumbs of her own image. “Every song I wrote became an escape rope tied around my neck to pull me up to heaven,” she rasps at the end of “Heaven Is Here,” and that horror at her own compulsions reverberates throughout the album. The songs concern devils and angels and life and death, but Dance Fever is more fascinating as a self-interrogation-these are Welch’s most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant.
And then, a week after she started making the songs that would become Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, lockdown hit.įrom those uncanny origins, the new album arrives as a sweeping, grandiose statement, no less outsized than Welch’s past releases but more internal and lyrically cohesive. She conceived her fifth album, Dance Fever, as a “‘be careful for what you wish for’ fable,” she told the New York Times as she read more about the dancing that spread like sickness, she thought about what it would be like to give up performing altogether. Four albums in, though, Florence and the Machine is an institution, and Florence Welch, the person, seemed rattled by how much she relied on it. When she started releasing records, her stadium-shaking voice and songs that crescendoed to catharsis lifted her into the pop charts alongside Adele and Bruno Mars. Entering her mid-30s, nearly 15 years into a career that began when she drunkenly sang to her future manager in a club bathroom, she wanted to prod at her relationship to performance. Just before the pandemic, Florence Welch read about choreomania, the medieval European “dancing plague,” wherein hordes of people would flail and twitch until they reached exhaustion, injury, or death.
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