Music Review: Florence and the Machine’s ‘Dance Fever’

metroweekly.com:

High as Hope, Florence and the Machine’s latest release, Dance Fever (★★★★☆) finds Welch and her band embracing a beautifully baroque grandiosity.So much of Dance Fever feels deeply cathartic, finding release in lush arrangements throughout and a handful of soaring, anthemic tracks.

On its face, the album delivers on its label, following up the slow-burning opener with “Free,” probably the album’s most straightforwardly danceable single.But Welch loves a multilayered meaning, and unsurprisingly, she takes a broader view of the idea of dancing fever.

Both the title and the almost-title track “Choreomania” encapsulate Welch’s admitted fascination with medieval dancing plagues, bouts of collective mania when people would literally dance themselves to death.Welch’s allusion to them is tongue-in-cheek, but she leaves it clear that they find plenty of handy parallels in a cultural moment when so much seems to be hanging on by a thread.Despite the celebratory mood Welch finds herself in, a sense of tension between everyday worries and the fraughtness of the present moment rears up again and again throughout Dance Fever in different forms.

On the first track, “King,” she puts a fine point on it, beginning with the lines, “We argue in the kitchen/about whether to have children.”For Welch, past and present are bound up as intimately as the personal and the global.