Of all the monstrosities contained in Everybody Screamwhich is an autumn album full of spells and sinister visions elaborated by a woman returned from the kingdom of the dead, the most impressive is contained in Kraken. Florence Welch is in front of the TV and begins to perceive her body as a foreign presence. Mysteriously, the water invades the room, it grows tentacles, it becomes a sea monster. It is a story of transformation, vulnerability and revenge born from the pain of not being seen. The singer, now a fascinating and hungry creature, stares with her one eye at the person who told her that she would never become anyone, sadistically drowns him and asks satisfied: “Do you see me now?”.
Not seeing it is impossible. Everybody Scream it's a great record and it's full of confessions like that. It's okay for it to come out on Halloween. It is the gothic elaboration of a personal trauma, it is a reflection on a relationship that comes and goes, it is an open window on the profession of a singer and in particular on being a woman in a man's world, that of music, and on her own scandalous ambitions and therefore on what she must give up to fuel them. The starting point is the miscarriage that Welch had in August 2023 during the tour of Dance Fever. That experience, the feeling of not having control of the body, the proximity to death led her to read about mysticism and witchcraft, which is a bit of the subtext of the album and which is announced in the coda of the title track in a stream of consciousness typical of Welch, interpreted by the female choir that accompanies her: “Witchcraft, medicine, spells and injections / The harvest, the needle, protect me from evil / The magic and the misery, the madness and the mystery.”
Another effect was the rediscovery of 60s and 70s folk which gives the album a disturbing tone, but less shouty than one might think having heard the first singles. Everybody Scream And One of the Greats. The first is the story of what it feels like to go on stage while thousands of people cheer you and how a concert can be transformed into a mystical-tribal experience. One of the Greats is at the same time a self-certification of the artist's greatness and the place of his doubts, the type of contradiction between desire for challenge and insecurity that animates many songs on the album. It also contains the line “it must be nice to be a man and make boring music because you can afford it” and one of the record's key images: “I crawled from under the ground / With broken nails and dust in my throat / Spitting out my songs like this / That you could sing with me / And in every gasp I knew I was back from the dead / To show you how it's done / To show you what it takes to conquer and crucify / To become one of the greats.”
Welch is not alone in her streams of consciousness, her horror stories, her daydreams. The Deep Throat Choir often appears, accompanying the singer on an otherwise solitary journey and doing so with vocal nuances ranging from hysterical to disturbing. It happens for example in the phenomenal Witch Dancea drunken dance and a gothic dream in which Welch opens his legs and lets death penetrate you, and then escapes through a city full of monsters who are not scary because “at the end of the day, there is no one more monstrous than me”. And how wonderful the confession of Sympathy Magicone of the two songs (the other is Drink Deep) written with Danny L Harle, when Welch's voice rises in pitch and over a percussion base he sings that “I don't find dignity to be a virtue, I don't try to be good anymore, it didn't protect me like you told me to”. And then, when the music stops, “head held high, arms open, aching, aching, aching, and alive, alive,” in a crescendo that is the very essence of the Florence + The Machine musical experience, with an added hyperpop twist.
If the mystical yet robust folk of Perfume and Milk recounts the slow process of healing from the dramatic events of August 2023 through an immersion in nature – as she sings “all shall be well” no one does – Buckle introduces the theme of love torment, perhaps for the guitarist from the English band with whom she tried to have her child, with a text full of confessions of weakness (“I'm stupid and broken and you're a disaster”, “you make me think that going to therapy is a waste of money”) and instead rhymed and almost cheerful music. The theme returns Music by Menthe story of a couple in crisis because relationships are not as they tell you, “it's much more difficult than it seems and there isn't much applause”.
Everybody Scream it is a record of dark and vivid arrangements, of unsettling bridges, of wonderfully verbose songs, of tremendous visions combined with pop melodies, of tensions and liberations, of choruses that seem to come from another world, like the glorious one that accompanies the “Do you see yourself now?” Of Kraken. There are stories inspired by other stories, like Drink Deep which was born after reading one of the stories of Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology. Announced by bells and punctuated by the vocals of the Idrîsî Ensemble, it is a horror tale that can be read as a metaphor for the artist's life: a mysterious people who give her clothes and riches and who make her drink a liquid that makes her eyes hollow and her skin cadaverous, and “what I thought was a night was a thousand years, what I thought was a sip was a thousand tears”.
Florence Welch is one who sings of pain, saying she “dug a hole in the garden and buried a scream in it and out of it grew a bright red tree shining with jagged leaves, and when the wind blows you can hear it”, and then screams “you can have it all”, an angry response to those who say that pop singers can have both a career and a family. Usually artists like this are not forgiven for being excessive, shameless, cumbersome, powerful. Welch is in the world in which he writes and in the passionate singing that can recall that of Patti Smith, without the punk and without the spitting, but with the elegant elegance that the daughter of a Renaissance literature teacher with a past of eating disorders and alcohol addiction can have. In the fantastic reworking of reality and in its being “too much” in certain passages, Everybody Scream is the quintessence of Florence + The Machine, specialists in exaggerated expressiveness. Florence is excessive, she writes lyrics that are too long, she thinks too much, she creates worlds, she sings in an intense and dramatic way, and that's the beauty of her: only by being cheeky can she sing about the monstrosity of being alive.
“Peace is coming,” says the last song called And Love. At the end of this folk horror journey Florence Welch explains that love is not the overwhelming feeling that they describe in the novels, it rather resembles a surrender and it is a beautiful world to close the album and try to put everything behind you, convincing yourself with a song-prayer that the pain will pass. And who knows, this year Halloween really isn't the night of witches who bring peace.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
