‘Ceremonials’: Florence Welch’s greatest vocal performance
Barely a whisper escapes Florence Welch‘s mouth when she is interviewed. She’s a soft-spoken woman, and that makes it even more awestriking that as an artist, she’s thunderous.
It is that earthquaking quality that instantly made Florence and the Machine a phenomenon. Welch’s powerful voice that shattered through the musical landscape was a clarion call to be heard above the guff of indie sleaze. When she first emerged with her album Lungs, and as tracks like ‘Dog Days Are Over’ and ‘Rabbit Heart’ were adopted as new indie anthems, it was always Welch’s voice that was the topic of conversation.
Her ability to flit between angelic folkishness and a pure, rock growl, from a girlish fairy into an animalistic banshee, a siren to a star: it made her an instant idol. It never even felt like there was a moment when she was a one-to-watch, because the second her voice hit the radios, people were paying attention, and have been paying attention since.
Throughout her discography, the levels that her voice can reach are put on full display. The depth and breadth of her abilities are show from the delicate beauty and high notes of songs like ‘Long & Lost’, to the impactful emotion as she pushes her voice to its limits on tracks like ‘Over the Love’ or ‘Sweet Nothing’. From soaring high notes to velvety depth, whispering section to booming belts, she’s done it all. But in 2011, on Ceremonials, she did all of it, and she did it to extremes.
In hindsight, Welch is aware that the performances she put in on her second album were almost to her own detriment. “When you’re 25 and you’re hungover all the time, you never think that your career is going to go on as long or you’re going to be having to try and sing these songs at 35,” she mused years later.
Perhaps that’s what makes the album so great. After the breakout success of her debut, Welch had no idea what might come next, and so there’s a sense on her sophomore of throwing absolutely everything at it, in case that was it. Every possible thing her voice can do, she does it on this album. ‘Only If for a Night’ is chanting and gothic, ‘Shake It Out’ is anthemic even as she pushes herself to the highest of high notes, ‘No Light, No Light’ is unrelenting with barely a second for a breath, while ‘Heartlines’ pushes that even further.
There are moments where Welch now can barely believe she ever pulled off with ‘Spectrum’ in particular standing out as a song that feels almost impossible now, stating, “Most of the songs on Ceremonials are really hard to sing because that album is just full out from start to finish, but ‘Spectrum’ is in a different register.” But she’s right; start to finish, Ceremonials is a masterclass in her vocal ability, one that even she struggles to keep up with.
It’s a blessing really. As she’s reflected on these songs, somewhat lambasting her old self for making them so hard, there’s always gratitude that she’s still here, attempting to sing them. “I was very tortured at that time, so the singing is also very tortured,” she reflected to Vulture about the record, “You’re not thinking about when you’re going to get to sing that song again; you’re tearing it out of yourself.”
Yet that tearing is what made the album so powerful as the feeling behind each song pushes her already dynamic voice to whole new places. It’s a triumph and her finest moment even as Welch herself jokes, “They’re all so hard because I’m an idiot!”
