Florence and the machine dance fever review

She examines this tension most strikingly on “King,” the album’s opener. The track chugs along over subdued percussion before it swells into classic, titanic Welch, belting over harp. 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. “I am no mother/I am no bride/I am king,” she howls. Welch’s ambivalence about motherhood is a central theme. “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. “Big feelings” are practically Welch’s brand, but on Dance Fever, she bristles at them. “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. At times, she reaches for profundity and stumbles into hyperbole. “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.

The album sags when it attempts its stated purpose: to celebrate dance itself. Partly this is because of just how disparate these tracks feel, likely as a result of their bifurcated production. 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. Dance Fever is as propulsive as any Florence and the Machine album, but its momentum sometimes feels unearned. Bayley twists “My Love” into a schmaltzy club track, kicking off with what seems like a trite Hamilton reference: “I was always able to write my way out,” Welch coos over finger snaps. Her past EDM collaborations sparkled—none more than the Calvin Harris-produced “Sweet Nothing”—but “My Love” is too stilted to open up a dancefloor. Even “Free,” perhaps the most buoyant song on the album, eventually becomes flimsy. It’s an ode to the power of dance, the freedom in movement—well-worn concepts that Welch treats like novel ideas.

But there’s a moment when the cello slows to a sputter and the frenetic drums ease up, and she seems to think out loud. “Is this how it’s always been,” she muses, “to exist in the face of suffering and death, and somehow still keep singing?” On another album, where the stakes were anything less than life and death, this question might be overwrought. But Dance Fever works best when Welch asks questions, when she’s a witness to terror and absurdity, marveling at her own ability to make it through.

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Florence and the Machine: Dance Fever

Although Dance Fever was made through successive lockdowns, it isn’t another pandemic disco record, exactly. Choreomania – a track that comes early in Florence Welch’s fifth album – is named for a medieval epidemic of involuntary movement, a “dance fever” understood then as a form of possession, and now as more of a mass stress response. So while Welch channels Into the Groove-era-Madonna on Free – “when I’m dancing, I’m free” – the emphasis on these very grownup, self-aware songs is on exorcising, rather than exercising.

Welch’s last album, High As Hope (2018), was candid in its treatment of this artist’s internal turmoil, but Dance Fever has you crawling around, a fly on the wall in her therapist’s office. Like Adele’s 30, Dance Fever has a lot to say about being female, about self-sabotage and compromise; it strums the pain of her listenership with its fingers, grappling with a muse that is sometimes more albatross than ally.

With production started by super-producer Jack Antonoff but finished by Dave Bayley, the album takes a step back from the vast productions of Welch’s most famous work, with nods to the Rolling Stones (Dream Girl Evil) and plenty of unexpected chiaroscuro, the better to foreground her luxuriant voice.

“I’m always running from something,” sing Florence + the Machine on “Free”, the latest single from Dance Fever, their new LP. “I push it back, but it keeps on coming.” The song’s title reflects breaking free from boundaries and oppression, which is the record’s central theme. In lockdown, vocalist Florence Welch drew most of the record’s inspiration from the phenomenon of choreomania, in which Europeans used to dance themselves to death. As a result, she says that much of Dance Fever’s influences were drawn from the likes of 1970s glam rock, naming Iggy Pop as the most significant musical inspiration.

The album nonetheless sounds like a collection only Welch could create, describing it as containing “folkloric elements of a moral panic from the Middle Ages”. Paradoxically, Welch also described her latest record as “Lungswith more self-knowledge”. Where the group’s previous album High as Hopewas simultaneously introspective and forgettable, Dance Fever retains Welch’s propensity for self-analysis while also airing her grievances with society at large, specifically vis-à-vis women and smashing the patriarchy. “If they ever let me out, I’m gonna really let it out,” she proclaims. “I listen to music from 2006 and feel kind of sick / But, oh God, you’re gonna get it / You’ll be sorry that you messed with this.”

All of Welch’s work is highly conceptual, and Dance Fever is no exception. Using imagery of witchcraft and extrasensory perception, the singer exorcises demons. But here, she is perhaps the closest she’ll ever get to the pop and rock icons who influenced the work, as Welch’s stage presence can only be compared to herself alone. “I’m free when I’m dancing,” she sings, suggesting that perhaps a life ended by dancing it out is better than life standing still.

Making copious use of collaborations with Jack Antonoff, Dance Fever stands out from its predecessors since it was produced during one of humanity’s most unprecedented periods. “I often think about everyone meandering back into the world now with so much unprocessed PTSD,” Welch told The Guardian. Since she often describes herself as an exceptionally introverted and anxious person, it makes sense that Welch would channel so much of that into a record aptly titled Dance Fever, created during a time when the only spaces to dance freely were in your living room. “I don’t really want to exist in a world where I can’t do the thing I feel like I was put on this Earth to do,” she said. “The thing that gives me meaning, that makes the jumble in my head — which is a sort of screaming nightmare a lot of the time — make sense.”

In this vein, Dance Fever sounds like Welch’s most conceptual album yet, but in a fashion that allows the most catharsis her work has conjured since “Shake It Out”. Although much more theatrical than the honest but somehow boring High as Hope, this record asks its listener to sit a bit with the noise in our heads that might usually make us so uncomfortable. “I’ve spent my life trying to run away from these big feelings,” she told Vogue, with big feelings representing anything from growing older, to motherhood, to the grand uncertainty of life at large. If our time away from the world taught us anything, it’s that we have to feel it to move past it. And with Welch’s signature brand of theatricality, the group wants us to do just that.

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