Florence + the Machine: Everybody Scream review – alt-rock survivor surveys her kingdom with sw…

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Florence + the Machine: Everybody Scream review – alt-rock survivor surveys her kingdom with swagger

(Polydor)On her self-deprecating, viscera-flecked sixth record, Florence Welch picks apart the compulsions and contradictions of fame

The title track of Everybody Scream provides a suitably striking opening for Florence + the Machine’s sixth album. A sinister organ and a choir of voices harmonise in the style of a horror theme, replaced in short order by the sound of screaming and a stomping glam rock rhythm; instead of the shouts of “Hey!” that traditionally punctuated a glitterbeat in the 70s, there are distaff cries of “Dance!” and “Turn!” Its sound offers a corrective to the notion that whenever the National’s Aaron Dessner appears as co-producer in an album’s credits, as he does here, it means the artist in question is striving for tastefully hued indie folk – the sound he brought to Taylor Swift’s 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, Ed Sheeran’s Autumn Variations and the mistier moments of Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us. It also provides a backdrop over which Florence Welch can ruminate on what sounds like a very complicated relationship with fame. She says she can only become her “full size” on stage and openly relishes the control she can exert over an audience, “breathless and begging and screaming”. Equally, there appears to be a downside. “Look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” she sings. “But how can I leave when you’re calling my name?”

For Florence Welch, Grief Has Become A Superpower

After an emergency medical issue brought her to the brink, the Florence + the Machine musician turned to mysticism and created Everybody Scream, one of her most profound albums to date. 

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Music Review: Florence + the Machine's 'Everybody Scream' wrestles with greatness and mortality

This album cover image released by Republic Records/Polydor Records shows “Everybody Scream” by Florence + The Machine." Credit: AP/Uncredited

During his acceptance speech for best actor at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, Timothée Chalamet made known his desire to be remembered as “one of the greats.” A few years earlier, Chalamet starred in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of “Little Women,” in which his character demonstratively asks his future wife, “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses, anyway?”

“Everybody Scream,” Florence + the Machine’s sixth album, is a response to that familiar, gendered notion. Across its 12 tracks, Florence Welch contends with both her desire for greatness and the constraints she understands to have been put on her as a female artist.

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