Album review: Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream

An air of both sadness and rage hangs over the sixth Florence + The Machine album, which feels appropriate given that it was created in the wake of massive personal trauma for Florence Welch. This is perhaps best exemplified by the devastating majesty of 'You Can Have It All' in which Welch comes across as part seer, part sixties rock priestess against a darkly atmospheric rock soundtrack that has all the scale and ambition of a Bond theme. It is an astonishing, immensely powerful piece of work that she, understandably, makes the listener wait for. 

Rather than go in hard, the album opens instead with the title track and first single, a song which vividly re-creates the experience and memories of the extended bacchanalia that was the Dance Fever tour of 2022-2023. It's interesting to hear Florence Welch's take on what happened on that tour; the nakedly feral nature of stadium and festival crowds who had been cooped up for two years under Covid lockdowns, and who were losing their shit on a nightly basis because they were allowed out again. There's even a lyrical reference to the moment at London's O2 when Welch (not for the first time) injured herself. A show she continued with, only realising the day after that she had been dancing and running around all night on a broken foot (again, not for the first time...) There's also some highly perceptive lyrical takes on the power a performer can feel while on stage "Here I can take up the whole of the sky, I'm burning, becoming my full size" compared to when they are off stage, a much smaller space where Welch feels trapped by the dichotomy of needing to be "Kind, extraordinary, normal, all at the same time." All in all, it's a stylish and fun opener which works well as a single and as a statement of intent. 

Second track and second single, 'One of The Greats' stands in marked contrast to the exuberance of 'Everybody Scream', providing as it does a brooding and brutally candid assessment of the innate sexism of the music industry. There is a strong sense that Welch is not so much colliding with the glass ceiling as taking a pickaxe to it in order to make a tiny hole to scream through. The result is a sprawling Patti Smith esque slice of catharsis that feels exhausting but somehow worth it. 

'Music By Men' applies the same brutally candid approach but to relationships and feels very like the natural follow up to 'King' in many ways: An older and sadder version perhaps. By contrast, the highly infectious 'Kraken' chugs along nicely in a Eurythmics vs Stooges kind of way, with an irresistible build that makes it feel like a kindred spirit to 2022's 'Dream Girl Evil', albeit one that is less obviously furious. 

While a number of the songs on Everybody Scream are quieter, more contemplative and pared down, there are still songs that conjure up the older and more established features of Welch's previous work: that sheer otherworldly, world building etherealness is conjured up evocatively and magnificently by the surging and complex 'The Old Religion' while 'Witch Dance' feels as though it's occupying similar musical ground to 'Choreomania'. In a similar vein, there are moments of something approaching joy on third single 'Sympathy Magic' which, while it lacks the innocence of 'Dog Days', does share some of its defiant spirit.

The song 'Perfume and Milk' feels both delicate and seeped in sadness, representing a retreat from the horrors of the world in order to get well and recapture some kind of sense of peace. 'Drink Deep', by contrast, feels much more primal and ambitious in scale. While the tension is relieved by the much more pared down 'Music for Men', it does pave the way for the emotionally raw, highly powerful majesty of 'You Can Have It All'.

She could have easily ended the album there but in including 'And Love', a sparser, more reflective and thoughtful piece that is the natural follow up to 'No Choir', she leaves the door open for something more hopeful to follow. 

Alison by Lizzy Stewart

At the heart of Lizzy Stewart’s graphic novel is a powerful truth: The struggle of a young woman to establish herself as an artist in times that, as Viv Albertine put it when I interviewed her about her own book, were “ungenerous” to women. This struggle is intertwined with the difficulties of women artists being able to step out of the box they’ve been put in by a more famous male artist patron.

When we first meet Alison, she’s a young wife who is isolated and bored, but not unloved. She catches the eye of a famous artist and he asks her to come back to London with him, where he will teach her. 

We follow the eponymous Alison over the years and decades as she works to establish her art and her life on her own terms. We watch her strike out on her own and establish her own community of friends and artists as her work becomes stronger and more confident. And we observe the ways in which she can never quite escape her past.

Stewart makes her points with subtlety and creativity, never hammering the message home, leaving the reader to observe and make up their own minds, but it’s nonetheless powerful for this and is the kind of book that will stay with you and leave you thinking for a long time afterwards.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

I avoided reading this book for a long time because it has as it’s starting point an American high school shooting and, as someone who saw Bowling For Columbine when it came out, and could never be arsed reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, I didn’t really feel like reading anything else about school shootings.

Anyway, in retrospect that was a mistake because Vernon God Little isn’t so much about the shooting itself (which has already happened before the story starts) so much as the fallout from it on the community, and on the shooters best friend - Vernon G. Little. 

In tone the novel has a lot in common with JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye as well as having some of the absurdism of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces. Vernon is an engaging, likeable, if foul mouthed anti-hero and Pierre is highly skilled at having his artless narrater reveal just enough, but not too much. As a satire on the US that was published in 2003, it has aged depressingly well, with things the novel predicted sadly now seeming far more possible than they did in 2003. 

A powerful and increasingly timely read.