Florence and the Machine — High as Hope (2018) | Album Review
High as Hope is a collection of strong songs, but is a weak album.
When you think of Florence and the Machine (FATM), you think of explosive, soaring vocals with sharp and wistful lyrics. On the singles preceding High as Hope’s release, it seems like Florence Welch will do more than just deliver: the impressive vocals are still there, but the songs, whether because the stripped down instrumentals give more room for the vocals to shine or because the lyrics deal with universal themes, seem magnificent, possessing a beauty recently unearthed. To top it off, the accompanying music videos elevate the songs further with their “high art” concepts, convincing the listener that FATM is heading for grandeur with their new album.
However, singles and their music videos to albums are like trailers to movies. Sometimes the trailer captivates the audience and the movie delivers. Other times, the audience shows up for the movie with a promising trailer just to realize that there’s not much to enjoy outside what’s already in the trailer. And unfortunately, High as Hope is one of the latter cases.
The cracks start to appear when you listen to the tracks on their own. Without the music video, “Sky Full Of Song” is as powerful, but it sounds so tired: “I thought I was flying but maybe I’m dying tonight.” The songs ends with an ominous metaphor, which is also its chorus: “And take me down, I’m too tired now/Leave me where I lie.” Welch likens herself to a bird that cannot land and is begging to be shot down. The image is potent, but helpless: the song doesn’t provide a way out, unlike the video whose symbolic sprouts provide the viewer with some hope. The mostly black-and-white video ends with a heartening prismatic shot of a flower, but the song provides one with two options, neither of which is optimistic: continue suffering or be shot down and die.
The second single, “Hunger”, doesn’t suffer as much as switching a rosy lens with a cloudy one, but it is definitely less powerful without its music video. In the visuals, people are fascinated with beauty and by beauty, matching the song’s theme of searching for love. But there is an upward curve of movements in the video. At the beginning of the video, Welch is seen laying and sitting on the floor, and people only gaze at the statue, taking in its magnificence. As the video progresses, people start to interact with the statue, and by the end, we see Welch dancing and the symbolic sprouts, interspersed with other fast-cuts. There are a lot of movements, and movements equate to power.
That the entire album is produced by Emile Haynie doesn’t help. If you look at his discography (Kanye’s “Runaway”, plenty of Lana Del Reys, some Eminem ballads,…) you can see his signature style: rather empty, dusty ballads that need to be grounded or left intentionally empty. Pairs this style with Welch’s big, reaching-for-the-sky vocals and what you have is a huge, hollow, heavy metal ball. “South London Forever” is where you can see the clash between the two producers. It starts off energetic with thumping instrumentals, but somewhere between the stretched out chorus and the languid kick drum, the song loses steam quickly, and it drags the whole album down with it. And for god’s sake, it’s the third song on the track list.
If you listen to each track on its own, they can still charm you: on album’s highlight “Big God”, Welch’s vocals sparkle with the support of Jamie xx’s synths and Kamasi Washington’s horn arrangement. Its layers build on and support each other, filling up any empty space and making a fully fleshed out epic. Furthermore, Welch’s ability to channel emotions still manage to drive the songs as she belts out hooks and hooks of desire, loss, pain, and longing. When put together in an album, however, the beige production intensifies, and even her strength turns out to be double-edged sword: the emotions she captures so effectively mount on each other and by the end of the album, most of what you feel is pain.
The problem here is that Welch provides so resolution in each song, hence allowing the pain to accumulate. The album opener “June” opens up the theme for the rest of the album, and all you can see is pain. While the title refers to Pride month, it is nothing one would normally associate with Pride: “In those heavy days in June / When love became an act of defiance”. Welch starts the song with a reference to the Pulse club shooting; the chorus consists of repetitions of the line “Hold on to each other”, as if the people around her is bracing themselves through a disaster; and when the song ends with “You’re so high, you’re so high/You had to be an angel/[…]I’m so high, I’m so high/I can see an angel”, one can’t help thinking that Welch is refering to death. There’s nothing wrong with a heavy queer song, but it has to be done right. Take Perfume Genius’ 2014 single “Queen” for example. Mike Hadreas brings out the not-so-shiny side of the LGBT community by employing enumeratio, pairing contradictory images together: “Riddled with disease” — “Flower bloom at my feet”, “Gleaming” — “Rank, ragged”. He then tops it off with a jab at comments viewing “homosexual behavior” as family-destroying: “No family is safe/When I sashay”. There is pain and there is anger, but there is also flamboyance, pride, and hope, the last of which Welch constantly reminds us that we’re devoid of.
The verdict on High as Hope is that the stripped down, soul-baring production provides the audience with beauty and Florence Welch delivers her usual dramatic songs. However, these epic songs quickly weigh down on each other, making the album mostly an unsatisfactory listen, to phrase it lightly.
Rating: B-
Essential tracks: “Big God”, “Hunger”, “Sky Full of Song”
For detailed grading scale, see here.
