Lay Me Down, Let the Only Sound Be the Overflow

Singers are a dime a dozen these days, just check out all the crappy karaoke shows that litter the networks these day. Very few singers use or can even use their voice like an instrument, and you can count Florence Welsh of Florence + The Machine as one of them. Her voice demands your attention from the first note managing the most controlled screams you will ever hear and turns them into some of the most beautiful sounds you will ever hear.

Now Florence and her Machine are back for their sophomore outing Ceremonials which is full with more anthemic songs with easy to chant along with choruses. At the top of this list is the epic What the Water Gave Me which soars from start to finish with Florence’s sweeping vocals backed by a frantic barrage of piano and fuzzed out guitars. Seven Devils is as spooky as the song title would suggest and will haunt you long after the last note has played (though not as haunting as her rendition of Addicted to Love). Lover to Lovers sounds like something Aretha Franklin would have recorded in the eighties, but Florence manages to keep it from going into the cheesy way pop music from that decade can easily go into. Ceremonials end with Leave My Body which sounds like the culmination everything the group was trying to make the album be.

If there is a complaint about the album is maybe Ceremonials is too epic that it almost becomes cumbersome. When you get through the hour long album it feels as if you had been listening to it all day. The album could be one of those that you buy at an MP3 outlet so you can through it on in shuffle to have other artist songs buffer the songs from this set. Ceremonials is also missing an upbeat danceable song along the lines Dog Days Are Over and You Got the Love to break up the monotony of the otherwise stellar tracks. Maybe producer Paul Epworth, who produced half of their debut Lungs (and most notably Adele’s Rolling in the Deep) returned to produce this entire album maybe only good at crafting anthemic tunes which is why all of Ceremonials comes across that way. Though maybe not the best album to listen all the way through, any of these songs would may a great addition to any playlist.

Song to Download – What the Water Gave Me

Ceremonials gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.