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Florence + the Machine High as Hope

Whenever you're heartbroken or going through some kind of emotional tumult, music often serves as a kind of auditory wine. It gets your feelings drunk in the most deliciously melancholic way and acts as a kind balm for your psychological aches and pains.

Over the years Florence Welch’s Florence + the Machine have shown a particular aptitude for dispensing the kind of melodramatic heartbreak music that goes perfectly with a glass of wine and solo slipper dance in your living room as a tear creeps down your cheek. Her latest album,

High as Hope, is no exception, though she seems to have simmered down ever so slightly.

If you’ve ever had any experience with Florence + the Machine then you’ll be aware of Welch’s power. Thanks to her moodily histrionic voice and her poetic songwriting, she has managed to carve herself a lane as one of pop music’s heartbreak chroniclers in chief. In previous albums she had played that role mainly through the use of big orchestral sounds and a voice that seemed like it could swallow a stadium whole. That voice is still there but this time around she has reined in her orchestral tendencies a touch.

Speaking to The Guardian, Welch says: “Before I thought I ran on a chaos engine but the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work. I can address things I wasn’t capable of before.”

That sense of peace shows.

Unlike her 2011 album Ceremonials or even her 2009 debut Lungs, the focus of this album seems less about inducing a chaotic but ultimately cathartic torrent of tears and more about unleashing that single picturesque droplet.

That, however, isn’t to say the album is without drama. Songs like Big God, 100

Years and No Choir are dramatic enough but on the whole Florence + the Machine is calmer. This is a good thing.

People often say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, and that may work well for cars, but in music it’s just repetitive. Florence and her machine could have carried on in the same vein as previous albums, but what’s the point of that? Jay -Z once said: “Nig*as want my old sh*t, buy my old albums.”

Florence + the Machine seems to be saying the same.