It's been quite a while since I have posted an album review, and I decided I should do one. Lungs is the debut album of english soul & indie artist Florence Welch. The spelling is a bit of a confusion, iTunes Store and Amazon.com refer to as "Florence + the Machine" while Last.fm and Wikipedia credit as "Florence and the Machine". Anyway, it seems the spelling of their name is the least of problems.
Florence was making music with her friend Isabelle Summers, they called each other "Florence Robot" and "Isabella Machine". Then she switched the name to "Florence + the Machine", judging by the name it seems like a band but this is her recording name, the Machine is a group of artists who provide backing music for her.
The album contains some good songs and some very good songs. Very good songs catch you at a few listens, remaining songs are at so-so level. There is no doubt that Welch is a magnificent singer, she has a very strong voice. Throughout the album, she doesn't make a single mistake in terms of singing, but seems like the Machine isn't working very well. It's her fault though, you can feel that Florence Welch is the boss of this thing. I think she didn't set her genre in her head yet. Some songs have the proper indie rock sound with great guitar riffs some have lots of strings and no guitars at all. It feels like this album was not produced by a single producer and in fact it really is. Florence knows music and it feels like she's been doing it for a while. I believe this is a compilation of her previous works. 46 minutes is not very long but she kept all the good songs for the first half and you get bored after a while. "Howl" I think is the best of the album and one of the best songs I've heard this year, "Girl With One Eye" is epic, "Kiss With a Fist" has a lot of joy and fun but all these songs were not brought together properly. All songs are individually good but it is very hard to follow. The only binding force is Florence's extraordinary voice but after a while you start to think this is a best-of album of the artist and each song represent different eras of her career.
In conclusion, this is an album with some very good songs performed by a very talented artist but the problem is it doesn't feel like an album at all. I think Florence needs to decide which way she will go in her career, and she has to do some mending to the machine. If Florence Welch takes my advise (I don't see any good reason why she should) she has the capacity to be an all time classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment