Album Review: Florence and the Machine, Dance Fever

For their fifth record, Florence Welch and co. have enlisted Jack Antonoff and Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley on production duties. The move pays off to stunning effect on a series of indie-dance gems, including ‘My Love’, ‘King’, ‘Choreomania’ and ‘Free’. Blending baroque-pop with folk textures, Dance Fever brilliantly tackles themes of joy, fury and grief. Equally influenced by ‘70s Iggy Pop and Lucinda Williams, it’s perhaps Florence’s most eclectic offering yet.

With characteristic imagination, the singer also alludes to tragic heroines of pre-Raphaelite art, gothic fiction and folk horror films. Shifting ideas of femininity throughout, the Londoner strives to break the chains holding her back: “We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children / About the world ending and the scale of my ambition”.

Elsewhere, softer gems like ‘The Bomb’, ‘Back In Town’ and ‘Girl Against God’ - which contain recurring religious imagery - retreat into heartbroken passivity in the face of an unobtainable lover.

After the brooding, ‘Restraint’ and the delicate ‘Daffodil’, the album concludes concludes with the gently acoustic ‘Morning Elvis’. In it, Welch wrestles with her impulse to quit after each tour - but the fact is, her songs are like children begging to be born. The stage calls to her, and we’re eternally grateful she answers every time.

9/10