Pitchfork: Dance Fever

[COOOK 76,406]

"Florence Welch’s pandemic album turns her intensity inward, interrogating her relationship to performance and public image. These are her most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant."

Spoiler

"Four albums in, though, Florence and the Machine is an institution, and Florence Welch, the person, seemed rattled by how much she relied on it. She conceived her fifth album, Dance Fever, as a “‘be careful for what you wish for’ fable,” she told the New York Times; as she read more about the dancing that spread like sickness, she thought about what it would be like to give up performing altogether. And then, a week after she started making the songs that would become Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, lockdown hit.

From those uncanny origins, the new album arrives as a sweeping, grandiose statement, no less outsized than Welch’s past releases but more internal and lyrically cohesive. The songs concern devils and angels and life and death, but Dance Fever is more fascinating as a self-interrogation—these are Welch’s most personal lyrics, and among her most poignant. “Every song I wrote became an escape rope tied around my neck to pull me up to heaven,” she rasps at the end of “Heaven Is Here,” and that horror at her own compulsions reverberates throughout the album. On Dance Fever, Welch stays trapped indoors, sobbing into bowls of cereal at midnight, trying to comfort herself with the crumbs of her own image. She built her public persona by beaming the grandest, fiercest emotions out to a crowd; left alone, she turns that intensity inward.

Unlike another Antonoff-produced pandemic reverie, Lorde’s Solar Power, Welch struggles against the wisdom she seeks to impart; we hear her wrestling with the knowledge she’s acquired, not merely delivering it. She sees herself as a projection, not a person, and she’s terrified by her impulse to self-mythologize."

"The album sags when it attempts its stated purpose: to celebrate dance itself. Partly this is because of just how disparate these tracks feel, likely as a result of their bifurcated production. Antonoff produced most of the first half of the album, and he shares a writing credit on many of those tracks; the latter half is largely produced by Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley. Dance Fever is as propulsive as any Florence and the Machine album, but its momentum sometimes feels unearned."

Full review here.

Previous scores:

      

   

[Cameltoe Chariot 15,224]

Pitchfork has consistently paid Florence dust and the reviews are aging like milk  can't wait for them to revisit her catalogue in another ten years and give them all readjusted 8+ scores 

...If they're still around in ten years, of course 

[alsemanche 93,846]

They've always had a vendetta against her, it's getting tiring. Imagine givung CEREMONIALS aka one of the best albums in recent history a 6  none of her albums deserves less than an 8, including High as Hope.

[Brainiac 10,940]

HBHBHB being the highest rated as it deserves.

[tyler k 5,330]

WOW why are her scores so low her music is too damn good

Dance Fever is GREAT, this score is too low

[EdgeofTeeth 1,934]

Pitchfork wrecks any credibility it might've had with its weird vendettas against certain artists, Florence being one of them. This album deserves an 8 at minimum, and most other publications got it right.

[nodandsmile 10,640]

HBHBHB being her highest rate 

but 6 Ceremonials? WHAT?

[Sneaky Oliver 22,217]

How could they give 5.7 to High as Hope?! Gross! That album was so beautifully done! It might not be as huge as HBHBHB but it deserved 6.5-7 for sure 

[eifulien 2,969]

I truly can't comprehend this arbitrary approach of theirs when it comes to reviewing albums. Is it an artist bias of sorts?

The fact that a profound and solid piece like High as Hope can be in the 5. range speaks volumes to me. Yeah, it's not my favourite album of Flo either, but  F+TM having a score lower than 7.0 for any album is kinda like wtf? What does a musician have to do for them to approve it? I'd add two full points to each score and that'd be representative of how I feel about their discography!