Ceremonials

Product Information

Occasionally the lyrics themselves can be slightly hackneyed, at other points brilliantly mysterious yet meaningful. Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size. To promote the album, Florence and the Machine embarked on their second worldwide tour titled the Ceremonials Tour on 13 October 2011. Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 27 on its list of the 50 Best Albums of 2011, adding, "From 'Shake It Out' to the arena-scale Motown of 'Lover to Lover', Big Red brings it again and again, choirs and string players backing a voice that soars so high, it makes them seem like ants on the ground below. The track charted at number 82 in the UK, [47] while reaching number three in Australia, the band's highest-peaking single in that country to date.

Not audiophile quality, but without a doubt better than the digital versions, which are major loudness war victims (DR 4-6). From the bits and pieces I had heard of this album preceding its release I had high hopes for it and it does not disappoint. Andy Gill of The Independent expressed, "[I]n cementing one style, some of the possibilities offered by Lungs have been choked off. The next time I encountered That Voice, it was five months later, in the relatively gigantic Terminal 5 on Manhattan's far west side.Lead single What the Water Gave Me, issued as a standalone cut in August, is brooding and windswept, its harp twinkling eerily in the ether. It also debuted at number one in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, and peaked at number six on the US Billboard 200, becoming the band's first top-10 album in the United States. The NME placed the album at number 31 on its list of the 50 Best Albums of 2011, writing that the album "amounted to pop in its purest sense, as something grand and strange and with ambitions higher than mere humanity, as the triple-headed priestess-muse Florence depicted on its sleeve suggested.

Where Lungs at times felt like pieces of entirely different albums Ceremonials is a cohesive whole: taking the mystical sounding instrumentation of Cosmic Love and Rabbit Heart and the pounding rhythms of Drumming and ramping them up to an even higher level. They performed "Shake It Out" and "What the Water Gave Me" on the Canal+ show La Musicale in France on 18 November. As does the similarly barreling "No Light, No Light", which is one of the few tracks where Welch sets aside her usual flighty, dreamy, goth-y lyrical go-to's-- ghosts, graveyards, devils, angels, myths, drowning-- for something a bit more personal.

The group stopped by BBC Radio 1 on 25 November for a special Live Lounge set, which included performances of "Shake It Out", "What the Water Gave Me", " Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)", " Dog Days Are Over" and "No Light, No Light", as well as a cover of " Take Care" by Drake featuring Rihanna. Time magazine ranked it as the second best album of 2011, stating, "Despite her penchant for emotive gloom, Welch's tales of heartache can be oddly uplifting; when she sings about darkness and demons, we know she will ultimately conquer them. The arrangements here are even more richly layered and majestic; they surge with strings and arrive backed by choristers, while the narratives are darker and prioritise the spirit over the corporeal. On her band's second album, it can feel like Florence Welch is simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. In an interview with The Guardian, she described the album as "much bigger" and categorised its genre as "chamber soul", a mixture of chamber pop and soul.