I don’t want to get overdramatic here, but when the walls keep closing in and we can’t rely on pop music to get us out of a jam, what’ve we really got? Too many bleak hours spent peering through train windows, fixing paper jams and despairing at the ineptitude of our so-called leaders forces us to place our hope for mankind in things that we know often do more harm than good, like pop records. But the trouble with expectation is the higher it soars, the further and harder it falls.
Only a soulless drooler wouldn’t want Florence + the Machine’s third album to be a great big belter. Hell, in these dark days of flaccid stadium-fillers, we need it to be a stone-cold killer. But the crushing reality is that it’s a near-flat heartbreaker, which will do little to brighten the stale pop horizons of 2015. At times it’s quieter and more introspective than what’s gone before, but that’s not the problem. Too much spirit and colour has been wringed out of these songs and hung out to dry by Mumford & Sons and Coldplay producer Markus Dravs, and the line between booming and overblown is crossed too often. The heaven-sent Florence Welch is in fine voice at various points, most impressively on lead single What Kind Of Man. Overall, however, this album is just another instance of the distance between how good you want something to be and how good it actually is being disappointingly wide.
BY PAUL MCBRIDE
