Florence + The Machine’s ‘Dance Fever’: burning up with brilliance
Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever may be the most relatable, confronting, and honest music that you’ve heard in a long time.
★★★★★
Photo: Press
Just three weeks ago, Florence + the Machine’s single Free was released. The track and music video full of honest, transparent, and confronting lyricism gave the world a taste of what was to come in her new album Dance Fever.
As an artist and musician, Florence has stood apart from many others in her ability to unique blend the ethereal, dark, and liberating to create tracks which leave their mark.
There is, without a doubt, the same sound interwoven within the fabric of Dance Fever, but this album feels far more vulnerable, introspective and self-reflective in nature than the previous four.
Speaking to The New York Times, Florence revealed the initial inspiration behind the album. She had heard about a medieval phenomenon called choreomania, where people affected by the ‘dancing plague’ would spontaneously dance themselves to death.
This idea fascinated Florence and this album really does feel like an existential examination of what being a dancer, performer and artist means to her – from the freedom, exhilaration, and transformation it brings to the doubt, despair, and isolation.
The album is like the pages of an open book, bound in gold, blood, sweat and tears. We are reading the stories of Florence’s and in many ways, our own lives. In Daffodil, the time at which the album was written (at the height of lockdowns) shows with the lines: “A generation soaked in grief / We’re drying out and / Hanging on by the skin of our teeth / I never thought it would get this far”. This and many of these tracks leave us feeling as vulnerable, seen, and heard as Florence’s relentless musical self-reflection.
In the melancholic and haunting King, the tone is one of both fear and liberation. The line “I am no mother / I am no bride / I am King” almost whispered in low tones by Florence, speaks to the challenge of her identity as a female within society and the music industry, as well as her own fears around her self-prophesying and image that she presents to the world.
We hear throughout the tracks the questions that run around her mind. In Cassandra, the stripped-back accompaniment with Florence’s flawless voice rises and falls to the words “Every song I thought I knew / I’ve been deafened to / And there’s no one left to sing to”.
Still, there is an eclectic mix of upbeat pop, acoustic melodies, and rhapsodic ballades in the album and each tune brings its own rich and glorious colours to the album. In Free, the lyrics begin: “Sometimes, I wonder if I should be medicated / If I would feel better just slightly sedated / A feeling comes so fast and I cannot control it / I’m on fire but I’m trying not to show it” builds to an exhilarating ending, where we feel in solidarity a sense of letting go of pain and sadness.
There are many tracks which really reveal to us the watershed feeling behind this album, the pivotal points of self-love, validation, of this letting go and rebirth.
Dance Fever is a euphoric journey which listeners are bound to revel in taking and sharing. Morning Elvis, the track that finishes the album, feels like an ode to everlasting hope and to the power that music, beauty and life must keep people going through this grief and devastation. The theme that continuously underpins the album is echoed in the final lines of the final track:
“Oh, you know I’m still afraid
I’m still crazy and I’m still scared
But if I make it to the stage
I’ll show you what it means
To be spared”