Florence + the Machine
- At the Mod Club
- in Toronto on Monday
There's no perfection in this world, except in recording studios. There, the lame can be made to walk and the pitch-challenged can sing flawlessly in tune.
I don't like to think too much about how those miracles take place, but sometimes I like to think about it, as Randy Newman says, and sometimes I have no choice. Standing in the Mod Club on Monday night, listening to Florence Welch and her band, the Machine, I couldn't help registering one big difference between how she sounds on record and what comes across in live performance.
The first thing you notice about Welch, live or on record, is that she has a huge voice. Lung power counts for a lot in popular music, and she pours it on in just about every song. Not for nothing is her debut album called Lungs, and there's no doubt that the irresistible force of her singing had something to do the album's nomination in Britain for this year's Mercury Music Prize (it lost to Speech Debelle's Speech Therapy).
Out of the studio, however, Welch has a cloth ear, or at least she did on Monday. There were many times during her hour-long set when she was wildly, loudly, implacably out of tune, even by rock music's liberal standards of intonation.
I'm not talking about a bit of expressive pitch-bending. Welch did some of that, and it was wonderfully soulful; but time and again she also opened up her pipes and attacked some high note way off the band's pitch, and just wailed on that bad note until I wanted to rip off my own head.
The psychology of listening is a mysterious subject, and I can't explain why nobody in my vicinity seemed to be suffering in the same way. In fact, the more grossly Welch abused the pitch (sometimes for an excruciating minute at a time), the more people cheered. Did they just not hear it? Or were they so bowled over by her full-on vocalizing that they sort of forgot to notice?
I wish I'd forgotten to notice, because there are a lot of things I like about Florence + the Machine. This is a band that can pull off a playful song about domestic abuse (in Kiss With a Fist, a genuine punk anthem) and also scale the heights of Gothic romance (in Drumming Song, about a woman who jumps into a river to drown the drumming in her head caused by the presence of her lover).
Hurricane Drunk posits drinking yourself to death as the lesser of two evils, and you buy this point of view because the huge explosive chorus gives you no choice. And yet when the music slows, it somehow makes perfect sense to hear a wash of harp arpeggios under Welch's belting vocals. The traditions of old-time English folk song run through her music like a subterranean river.
The band went against the grain in other ways, using lots of percussion (Welch and her touring bassist often hammered away at nearby toms), but showing no great love for backbeats. Are You Hurting the One You Love?, introduced by Welch as "a random B-side," rode a vintage girl-pop groove, but with all those deep added beats it turned into something stranger and more interesting.
Welch's voice is about more than just volume: When she sang a line like "you've got the love," she filled it with the intensity of the light that draws the moth that is the human heart. She's also a magnetic performer to watch, with her grand gestures and coppery hair. I'd like to think she's a diamond in the rough, and that she can fix the fault that made her performance, for me, a queasy mixture of the sublime and the unbearable.
