Florence Welch has been causing a stir with her own distinctive brand of alternative-pop-rock-soul.
She entered the music scene in 2009 with the release of her debut album Lungs and 2011’s Ceremonials established her as one of Britain’s foremost female music exports, so heavy expectation awaited the release of her latest offering, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful back in May. Following in the tradition set by her previous two albums, this album is thick with religious imagery and metaphor.
Only two weeks before this year’s event took place Florence & the Machine were given the Foo Fighters’ headline slot at the Glastonbury music festival, the latter unable to perform due to Dave Grohl’s untimely broken leg.
Blend of religious & pagan themes
Welch’s remarkable live performances bear significantly on the reception of her recorded material; her sound is inseparable from the aesthetics of her roundly defined brand. On the whole shunning a sexualised image, she has become a symbol of free-spirited, ethereal independence. Her music videos frequently blend traditionally religious settings with pagan-esque sacrifice and fairy-tales. Her music helped to pave the way for a current trend in contemporary lyrics to borrow and reappropriate religious language for their own purpose – Hozier’s ‘Take Me To Church’, The Staves ‘Make It Holy’ and Arcade Fire’s ‘Reflektor’ to name a few.
The scene in which the songs of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful are set is expansive, broad, glittering and obsessed with love. The lyrics tell of searching for significance when everything of this life seems so impossibly cosmic. In the opening song ‘Ship To Wreck’ Welch sings: ‘I can’t help but pull the earth around me to make my bed’. Perhaps unwittingly, this line captures something biblical about the role humanity has in subduing the earth and the safe dwelling place it was originally intended by a loving Father to be for his children. The next few songs explore the tension that exists in our knowing the earth to have a wildness of its own, rebelling against our efforts to subdue, which leaves it groaning for redemption, but still it is able to bear fruit and offer beauty. Because we live in exile from the perfect garden we were made for, sometimes this life seems unbearable: ‘suddenly I’m overcome/dissolving like the setting sun/like a boat into oblivion’. Here, in ‘Queen of Peace’, Welch expresses a sentiment that runs through the album.
Unsatisfying self-help
In the middle of the tracklisting sits ‘Various Storms & Saints’, a song whose lyrics run rampant with individualism and self-belief. In the effort to medicate against self-destruction, Welch declares ‘I am teaching myself how to be free’. Free of guilt, free of enemies and free of our bent to do things which do us no good. Sound familiar? We recognise all of this to be part of the human condition and we know that the only solution to this lies in Christ’s work on our behalf. In contrast, Welch provides an unsatisfying theory of self-help: ‘people just untie them-selves/uncurling life-lines/if you could just forgive yourself’. This is developed even more heartbreakingly later on: ‘you sing it out loud “who made us this way?”/I know you’re bleeding but you’ll be okay/hold onto your heart you’ll keep it safe’. If dissatisfaction with our guilt, our wrongdoing and our flawed living push us to ask questions about how we got here and who created us, so much the better! But Welch quiets the question with empty optimism.
A cry to God?
In the closing song ‘Mother’, Welch encapsulates the feeling of having chased after everything you thought would make you happy, and yet finding it’s not enough. She asks, ‘Oh Lord won’t you leave/leave me on my knees?/’cause I belong to the ground now/and it belongs to thee […]/I want no more than this’. This is utter chaos. The previous 43 minutes have been spent acknowledging the gravity of living and shunning God as the life-giver, yet here she calls on him in despair, wanting to resign her humanity in favour of becoming the earth.
Like her previous albums, this newest release is swirling with references to saints and biblical stories, and features church-like chants and choral backing vocals. Progression lies in the content of the lyrics which, while reminiscent of previous material, are more serious in their misplaced reverence for, and expectation of holiness from, the love humans are capable of. Judging by her lyrics, particularly the point at which the album ends, it seems Welch is perilously close to realising that holding onto our own hearts will do us no good, and that we have to die in order to truly live.
