Like so many people coming out of the woodwork from the mid/late 00s, Florence + the Machine adds to the roll call of musicians (like Lily Allen) who have dusted themselves off to give us new material in 2018. Except, in Lily Allen’s case, that music is among the best of her career. Where Florence + the Machine’s fourth album is concerned, it doesn’t feel like Florence Welch has made much of a musical leap from How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. In fact, it would be almost impossible to top the lead single from that record, “What Kind of Man.” And no, “Hunger” does not quite manage to do that despite the deeply personal nature of the lyrics referencing Welch’s early in life anorexia.
But before delving into that topic, there is “June” (fitting, since High As Hope was released on June 29th), a re-examination of the Pulse nightclub shooting that occurred on June 12, 2016 while Welch was touring for How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. Making note of how the sky turned black as she was performing, connoting some ill portent, Welch opens the track with, “The show was ending and I had started to crack/Woke up in Chicago and the sky turned black.”
Setting the thematic tone of having hope in the face of total despair and bleakness, “June” can only offer this as one constant consolation: “hold on to each other.” Even if that means basically hugging yourself because you’re a loner Dotty, a rebel. With the motif of oppression and American mass shootings addressed right out the gate (who the fuck she think she is: Marina and the Diamonds? Obsessed with the mess that’s America?), Welch transitions into a more introspective as globally applicable track, “Hunger.” Perhaps because of how powerful and resonant it is, Welch dropped the ball elsewhere on the album (e.g. “Grace” and “No Choir”). With an A.G. Rojas-directed video featuring a saint-like statue visited by huddled masses, Welch dances about as she ardently declares, “We all have a hunger”–an insatiable need to be filled by something that we can’t often pinpoint. Which is precisely why we try to fill that void with things that we think will substitute this arcane concept of love: drugs, spending money, gambling and other self-destructions. So it is that Welch concluded the video with the title card: “How Many Have to Die So That You Can Feel Loved.” In this person’s case, it would take the number of stars in the galaxy represented as humans.
Reminiscent of her South London (specifically Camberwell) roots in a much more nostalgic, less embittered way than Morrissey is of Manchester, Welch’s lovingly titled “South London Forever” echoes shades of Lana Del Rey’s wistful but cautionary “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” as she talks of her reckless, alcohol-addicted youth, remarking, “Remember how we used to party up all night?/Sneaking out and looking for a taste of real life.” Similarly, Welch speaks of her carefree adolescence spent drinking and having sex with whoever she wanted, certain that this was what constituted true and unbridled freedom as she insists, “It doesn’t get better than this/What else could be better than this?” Turns out, certainly not fame and fortune (speaking to the “Hunger” problem of seeking love and meaning in things that are actually hollow). And maybe Welch has that one person she always thinks of no matter what (same as Del Rey), realizing, “But everything I ever did was just another way to scream your name.” Then again, maybe that name is liberation, always just out of reach.
The other standout track and single on the album is the moody and visceral “Big God” (with a video to match said moodiness and visceralness), in which Welch notes that you need a “big one” to channel all your love and emotions into. In most cases, at least as women, it tends to be done in the form of funneling that passion into one’s significant other. Thus when they cast you out of the paradise you thought was their love, you’re liable to scream just as woefully as Florence, “Well, Jesus Christ, it hurts!“ In a somewhat avant-garde move, Welch loosely compares the concept of being ghosted to a religious experience, as you start to talk to someone–even plea with them–knowing full well that, like God, they will never give you a response. We’ve turned fuckboys into deities, in short. In the end, however, Welch does seem open to the idea of settling for affection from some sort of higher power (since she can’t get it from one down here on earth), singing, “Shower your affection, let it rain on me/Don’t leave me on this white cliff [very Wuthering Heights]/Let it slide down to the, slide down to the sea.” Or is this just a sexual allegory?
Following with the hymnal “Sky Full of Song,” Welch asks those around her to save her from herself, referring to the exhaustive touring days of 2015, when not only did she realize that to sing about her pain on stage ad nauseum was more trauma than catharsis, but also that her boyfriend of the time was likely cheating on her as she herself went on benders of debauchery that naturally come with tour life. “I can tell that I’m in trouble when that music starts to play,” she recalls, knowing that the emotional comedown of performing for thousands of admiring fans is a difficult one to endure night after night. To boot, she apprehends, “And I want you so badly, but you could be anyone/I couldn’t hide from the thunder in a sky full of song.” In such desperate search of affection (as explored on “Hunger” and “Big God”), she notes that she’s, at this point, willing to settle for any soul that might comfort her and truly pay attention to her, all the while waiting for the thunder to beat down on her as she carries on with her destructive way of living–the sky full of her song at festivals and shows no match for the eventual fallout.
Less vocally expressive (yet with a primary focus on vocals over backing music) is “Grace,” another memory-filled track highlighting Welch’s drug-addled youth as she apologizes to her younger sister, yes, named Grace, “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday, you had turned 18/And the sunshine hit me and I was behaving strangely/All the walls were melting and there were mermaids everywhere/Hearts flew from my hands and I could see people’s feelings.” It seems, however, it’s taken this much time for Welch to truly see her own.
In the sonic spirit of Patti Smith, “Patricia” is an homage to this goddess of rock n’ roll, as Welch gushes, “Oh Patricia, you’ve always been my North Star.” As such, the song is chock full of allusions to the 70s and overall icon, from making note of Smith’s book, M Train, to their shared coffee enthusiasm (both capable of drinking mass amounts before being affected).
Because no record of the present is complete without a touch of the political, “100 Years” serves as Welch’s statement on the repetition of history with the remark, “The streets, they still run with blood/A hundred arms, a hundred years/You can always find me here.” This, of course, also addresses the fact that any fight worth fighting is going to take time–centuries even (as has definitely been the case with attempting to get men to view women as equal and “worthy” of said equality).
Exploring the concept of love in both romantic and familial terms (for the latter so often colors the way we love in the former), “The End of Love” again likens ghosting to a religious experience as Welch modernizes Joshua receiving the ten commandments with: “And Joshua came down from the mountain with a tablet in his hands/Told me that he loved me, yeah/And then ghosted me again.” The tablet, in this case, is just an iPad where Joshua ignores your iMessages. As for the water imagery–“let it wash away, wash away,”–it refers to Welch’s family legend about a great-great grandfather living in Galveston, Texas in the 1900s, and, as Welch explains it, “knew that if there’s a storm, you break up the boards at the bottom of the boat so that the water can rush in and rush out, and won’t wash the ship away. So he broke up all the floorboards in the house and hid the family in the attic, and the water rushed into the house and rushed out. A lot of the houses were just washed away, but their house survived and the family survived.” It’s a common theme on this album, that notion of surviving through the wreckage (Florence + the Machine also having a song called “Ship to Wreck” on How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful).
But rather than conclude with “The End of Love,” Florence opts for “No Choir” as her bookend, an examination of discovering that the middle ground between the highs and lows of existence is what life is truly about (again a “Patrician” a.k.a. Patti Smith philosophy). The ability to find joy in simplicity has been a long road for Welch as she states, “And it’s hard to write about being happy/’Cause the older I get/I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject.” And maybe that’s the core issue with this album. For while it is technically “good,” it doesn’t stand out in one’s mind save for the three singles already released. That said, we’re all just looking for pleasure in someone else’s pain.
