What makes a relationship stronger than ever? Is it heart touching love full of bizarre twists and turmoils or is it just a void? What if it is a metaphysical storm that makes your feelings and bonds impenetrable? A storm that you and your partner have to go through in order to keep yourselves stable, a storm so strong that with a contradiction it can turn your perforated heart into a healthy one? Again, what if the storm necessarily isn’t a pre requisite for a budding, tolerating relationship? What if you are the ones creating the disaster within yourselves?
As an ardent lover of British Indie bands and their heart swooning melody, Florence and the Machine has always been on my top selection. As Florence Welch’s soothing voice melts like succulent treats of chocolate, she transports the listeners to a new world. With her recent album, she has proved again that she’s worth of all our applause.
“How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” -- people may refer to it as an album, but to me, ‘tis a tale. A tale of the demons inside us, the entities inside us adhering to the givings of our sub conscious, the disaster that we create within ourselves, a tale of raw and unbridled passion.
The album released in 2015 has an array of emotions, yet possesses a power of rage, rage against the evil lurking around us, against the bullies of our emotions, against the heathen, against the ambiguous nature of life. The whole album is divided into stories, with the music videos intertwining and creating a series of interconnected sagas. Majority of the tracks form a story, and so music videos were also released as a foregoing tale, a short film directed by Vincent Haycock had also been released known as “The Odyssey”, along with separate music videos shadowing a story of tyranny.
Florence Welch basically took inspiration from her recently ended relationship and gave us a wonderful masterpiece with a beautifully vibrant psychology, complete with her own charisma. In the album, Florence and her lover plays the protagonists, while the commoners of the society opposing their relationship and the demons inside them portrays the antagonists. They are shown to be struggling, struggling against their own endeavors and initiatives of surviving a storm together and therefore trying to settle their tumultuous life when in reality things just take a wrong turn for them, thus entrapping them in clogged surface, surface of endless uproars to their utter horror.
The thing that attracts me the most about this album is that Florence shows the utmost maturity amidst all metaphysical turbulence and biblical references that is rarely seen in the limelight of Hollywood jukeboxes. Her feelings are juxtaposed, a contrasting effect of delight and dilemma, which sweeps us, the listeners right off their feet. One of the most unique features of this band is that they tend to focus on a particular issue for each of their album and that becomes the raising theme for their designated album. Just like they worked with Water and fire in the albums “Ceremonials”(2011) and soft/prayer theme in “Lungs”(2009), the drawbacks of a failing relationship and struggle for existence with a touch of psychological side is the theme of “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful”(2015).
If anyone is interested in genres like Brit Indie/Soul/Baroque pop/Chamber pop, or want to catch up on the beautiful music videos set in the Scottish peninsulas, or in for a bumpy ride of biblical references mixed with enigmatic yet alluring vocals, this album, enable to give people a break from the humdrum world, is a must listen for them.
