Wednesday, July 4, 2018

July 5 - Florence + The Machine

I don't know why it took me almost a week to write about Florence + The Machine's new album, High As Hope. It came out last Friday, and I was literally refreshing Spotify once an hour at the office to see when I would be able to listen to it. This woman is incredible and everything she makes is magic. That's my general opinion, anyway. She's basically my Beyonce. And with her new album, she has not disappointed.

She'd already put out 3 singles, Sky Full Of Song (which was on the blog previously), and then Hunger (which I thought was on the blog but wasn't but will be now!) and Big God before the album. So as promised, here's Hunger just because it's amazing and was the first official single from the album and I thought I'd already done this and don't know how I didn't.




I mean, how could you hear that song weeks ago and not be excited for the album? Honestly, I thought How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was her worst album. Still good, but over the course of her 3 previous albums, I thought she continuously went downhill. But in her defense, Lungs is an incredible album. So hard to follow up. Well, Hunger had me thinking we'd be on the right track.

So then the album came out, and I put it on, and I was welcomed with June. Which, despite being already excited for the album thanks to the previously released tracks, far exceeded any expectations I had. June is such an incredible song, both musically and thematically. I mean, come on Florence. Starts out simple, with Florence's beautiful vocals and a bit of plucked string, and then just builds and builds to a massively wonderful crescendo. Imagine how good this song would be live. Insane. And with everything that is wrong with the world right now, she's just giving us this beautiful message of love and hope. Smart lady. She's right. Sadly, love is an act of defiance now. So listen to her and hold on to each other.




Then we go through this wonderful album, and towards the end we come to probably the best song, The End Of Love. Sad title, but as Florence put it, it's actually positive. It's supposed to mark the end of a needy, desperate kind of love and a maturation. Also, it's gorgeous. Those vocal harmonies on the chorus? (insert all kinds of emoji here). And I love that surprising little bit of keyboardy synthesized stringy thing on the second verse. Whenever I listen on headphones, I think I'm hearing something outside the song, and it's jarring and shocking, but then once I realize what's going on it's perfect. This whole song is perfect. The album is damn near perfect. The only problem is I can't buy it yet because I'm waiting for the Deluxe version cause I need more. Anyway, juts go listen over and over and over like I have. It's been easily a dozen times in under a week. I'm sure you'll do the same.


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