By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 16, 2011
Florence and the Machine broke out in a big way last year with the album Lungs – many listeners will recognize “The Dog Days Are Over,” which was used as promotional material for Eat Pray Love last year. The band’s bold style hit a chord with listeners with its slightly macabre themes, infectious beats, and catchy, memorable verses. I am sorry to report, however, that Florence and the Machine’s new album Ceremonials does not live up to this standard.
The reason Lungs succeeded as much as it did was the focus on Florence’s voice, combined with steady, irrepressible drumbeats. Ceremonials has only a shadow of these elements—it is still recognizably Florence and the Machine—but Florence’s strong voice is either distorted in a way that is disturbingly Enya-esque, or backed by whispery, breathy voices. The songs from Lungs not only felt as though she was singing in the listener’s ear but directly into the listener’s brain, lending an urgency to the tracks that is simply not present in Ceremonials. The vocals are almost completely lost in effects – especially disappointing considering the pure strength and force that we know she possesses. We still get flashes of this in “Never Let Me Go” and “Shake It Out,” but, for the most part, the vocals are clouded to the point where they lose the immediacy that turned Lungs from a solid album into a great one.
The other thing that is starkly noticeable when contrasting Ceremonials to their earlier work is the pace of the songs as a whole. Although there were slow songs on Lungs and there are fast songs on Ceremonials, all in all, the pace is much more relaxed. Again, this is something that doesn’t necessarily work for the band. It’s not unbearably slow, just slow enough for the listener to lose focus and wander. As opposed to Lungs, which made the audience sit up and take notice, it is entirely too easy to get distracted and let this album become background noise.
Bands grow and change from album to album, and many are eager to try new things – this album simply seems as though it has taken the band farther away from the direction they were so promisingly headed. “Lover to Lover” has an almost gospel feel to it, which is odd to say the least, and “No Light, No Light” starts with an effect that is frighteningly close to that used in many popular electro-club pop hits. It’s fairly safe to say that Florence and the Machine are testing their wings and experimenting with their sounds. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but I don’t have to like it.
There are definitely some highlights to the album – I recommend “Breaking Down” and “No Light, No Light” in particular as worthy of attention. The problem here isn’t that it’s a bad album, but that it’s simply below the standard that Florence and the Machine set with Lungs. The listener can still faintly hear the after-image of greatness that pounded through their first album—but it’s so far-away and distorted that it only serves to remind the listener how unalike the two albums really are—and, in contrast, how utterly disappointing this album is.
