ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Florence + the Machine ★★★★★

When an album arrives with a title like Dance Fever, you could be forgiven for expecting an outbreak of glitter balls, Spandex and disco anthems. But, for Britain’s most artily cerebral pop diva, Florence Welch, dance fever refers to a medieval mass psychosis that gripped the German town of Aachen in the 14th century and saw people dancing until they collapsed and even died.

Choreomania (as the condition was termed) is the title of a song on the fifth album by one-woman band Florence + the Machine. It is a whirling dervish of a track, driven by handclaps and a pulsing mélange of violins, harp and electronics, stirring a giddiness more evocative of spinning around a maypole than pulling slick moves at Studio 54. Nevertheless, this fever has a contemporary edge.

“You said rock and roll is dead / But is that just because it has not been resurrected in your image?” Welch demands as a female choir roar “Something’s coming!” like an assemblage of Wagnerian Valkyries. “Like if Jesus came back / But in a beautiful dress”, the singer mischievously adds.

When Welch first emerged on the London indie-rock scene in 2006, there was a lot of discussion about female artists asserting themselves in very male (and, many would have said, increasingly stale) musical territory.

Like the sainted Kate Bush (to whom she has often been compared), there is something assertively feminine about Welch’s persona and imagery. She styles herself like a PreRaphaelite poster girl and envelops her extremely literate lyrics in fluttery, vibrato high notes before summoning the full lung power of her ululating war cry.

On Dance Fever’s imperious opening track, King, Welch ponders her artistic ambition, rejecting traditional female archetypes (“I am no mother, I am no bride”) before declaring “I am king!” Proclaiming the male regal title sounds at once transgressive and joyously funny, its power emphasised by a monumental drum break and the thunderous impact of her band piling in.

The sound throughout shifts sinuously between the delicate and the huge, a baroque blend of epic Gothic pop and melodic folk, its innate pop sensibilities maintained by two new (for Welch) co-writers and producers, the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey) and Dave Bayley of breakout British band Glass Animals. Maybe that professional pop framework was needed to stop Welch going completely off the deep end. Written and recorded in lockdown, Dance Fever wrestles with a palpable frustration, contemplating the sacrifice of domestic life for a creative existence in which songs are “like children begging to be born”.

Welch’s self-mythologising is extravagant, her poetic language overloaded, yet her lush music binds it all into something magical on songs that exploit explicitly female archetypes to examine her own psyche. Dream Girl Evil confronts reductive male fantasies, Cassandra uses Greek myth to question the personal cost of art, while

Daffodil celebrates the rebirth of spring with a storming glam-rock ode to a flower. The circle of the album closes with the delicate hangover of

Morning Elvis, a blowsy fever dream in which Welch compares herself to rock ’n’ roll’s original monarch. The king is dead. All hail the king!

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK Kendrick Lamar: Mr Morale and the Big Steppers (pgLang); The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention ( XL), The Rolling Stones: Live at the El Mocambo (Polydor)