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Lungs received mostly positive reviews from music critics.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100
to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an
average score of 79, based on 22 reviews, which indicates
“generally favorable reviews”.James Christopher Monger of
Allmusic praised the album as “one of the most musically
mature and emotionally mesmerizing albums of 2009. With
an arsenal of weaponry that included the daring musicality of
Kate Bush, the fearless delivery of Sinéad O'Connor, and the
dark, unhinged vulnerability of Fiona Apple, the London native
crafted a debut that not only lived up to the machine-gun
spray of buzz that heralded her arrival, but easily surpassed
it.”

Ryan Dombal wrote for Pitchfork Media that Welch “bursts
mouth wide wide over garage rock, epic soul, pint-tipping
Britbeat, and mystic brand of pop that's part Annie Lennox,
Grace Slick, and Joanna Newsom.” Entertainment Weekly's
Joseph Brannigan Lynch opined that Welch's “immaculately
constructed indie pop recalls Regina Spektor, but without the
studied artiness: Welch is more concerned with raw emotional
release.” Spin's Melissa Maerz stated, “From the way she
sings, in big gulps and Teen Wolf growls, to the mystical art-
rock ballads she bedazzles with sleigh bells, harps, and choirs,
there's enough drama here for a Broadway musical. But her
delivery is so raw that every mess feels genuine.”
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Sophie Bruce of BBC Music was emphatic, saying, “With
vocals building from breathy almost-nothings to soaring,
arching crescendos and the accompanying harps, strings,
hopes and dreams, this album takes you somewhere
you'll never want to come back from.” Emily Tartanella of
PopMatters called Lungs “a perfect debut”, complimenting
the album's “vast jumble of influences, from Kate Bush and
Tori Amos to UK electronica, with Florence's voice taking on
most of the work”, while describing Welch's voice as “a mix of
jazz and folk and blue-eyed soul like nothing in a long time. Or
rather, like everything.”

Rolling Stone's Jon Dolan expressed that he best bits feel
like being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor
witch.” Slant Magazine critic Nick Day referred to the band's
music as “particularly sensitive to studio gloss” and prased
her singing as “a fine balance between elegance and frenzy.
In a review for The Guardian, Dave Simpson commented that
Welch “has created a sonic labyrinth of xylophones, percussion,
Gregorian chants and werewolves. It can sound affected,
occasionally crass, but there's enough adventure to make this
worth backing for the Mercury.”

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Jamie Fullerton of the NME commended the work of
producers James Ford and Paul Epworth, stating that on
tracks like “Dog Days Are Over” and “Rabbit Heart (Raise It
Up)”, they “create epic cauldron-swirls of Terminator-theme
drums, Massive Attack atmospherics and twinkle-eye harp
matched by Florence's grappling of skyward choruses”, but
added that “with the likes of 'I'm Not Calling You A Liar' and
'Howl' boasting similarly windy production yet no identifiable
tunes the results sound aimless—if harmless.” Drowned in
Sound's Ed Miller commented on the comparisons drawn
between Welch and fellow English singer Kate Bush, arguing,
“Like Bush, but minus the mark of genius, listening to Florence
and the Machine can sometimes feel like being led by the
hand through a story world by a girl who has forgotten to
grow up.” However, Miller believed that he only major problems
are the inclusion of a cover of 'You've Got The Love', which
is an example of a bonus track ruining the flow of an album,
and 'Hurricane Drunk', a vehicle for a very questionable
chorus.” Genevieve Koski of The A.V. Club felt that times,
Lungs borders on exhausting, careening as it does from one
over-the-top track to the next. But with a voice as strong and
emotive as hers, it's not surprising that Welch has little use for
moments of quiet contemplation.”

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ceremonial

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TLRI SATC K

O N LY I F F O R A N I GH T

S H A KE I T O U T

WH A T T HE W A T E R G AVE M E

N EVE R LE T M E G O

BREAKING DOWN

L O VE R T O L O VE R

N O L I O GH T , N O L I GH T

S EVE N DEV I L S

HE A R T L I N E S

SPECTRUM

A LL T H I S A N D HE AVE N T O O

LE AVE M Y B O DY

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ceremoniALS

Ceremonials is the second studio album by English indie pop
band Florence and the Machine, released on 28 October 2011 by
Island Records. The band started working on the album in 2010 and
finished it in 2011. All of the songs on the album were produced by
Paul Epworth, who also worked prominently on the band's debut
album Lungs

The album received acclaim from music critics, who drew
comparisons to artists such as Kate Bush, while also praising the
instrumentation and production of the songs. As a critical success,
it appeared on several year-end critics' lists in late 2011. Ceremonials
debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, becoming the

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band's second consecutive number-one album in the UK. It also
debuted at number one on the Australian Albums Chart and peaked
at number six on the US Billboard 200 chart. English novelist Emma
Forrest contributed an essay to the album, which can be found in
the booklet of the CD edition.

To date, four singles have been released from Ceremonials. "What 63
the Water Gave Me" was released on 23 August 2011 as a teaser for
the album, along with a music video. "Shake It Out" was released on
30 September 2011 as the album's official lead single, becoming one of
the band's most commercially successful singles to date. "No Light,
No Light" was released on 16 January 2012 as the second official single
from the album and "Never Let Me Go" was released on 2 April 2012.
Ceremonials was also promoted by the band by a worldwide tour,
Ceremonials Tour.

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development

NME magazine confirmed that after the release of the song
“Heavy in Your Arms” for the soundtrack to The Twilight Saga:
Eclipse, lead singer Florence Welch entered the studio for a two-week
session to record with producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Bloc Party),
with whom she worked on the band's debut album Lungs (2009).
She said that the two recordings that came out of that session
were inspired by science because “a lot of her family are doctors or
trying to become doctors, so much of her conversations are fixated
on medical stuff.”

In an interview with the Gibson website on 17 February 2011,
guitarist Rob Ackroyd stated, “Work on the second album has
begun with Paul Epworth and there is talk of booking out Abbey
Road for a month in April/May to record.” In June 2011, Epworth
told BBC 6 Music that the album would probably be finished “by
the end of July” and described the sound as “a lot less indie and lot
more soulful”.He also indicated that there were sixteen songs up for
inclusion on the album, but that this would be reduced upon the
time of release. On 23 August 2011, Pitchfork Media confirmed after
the release of “What the Water Gave Me” that the album has the
band working solely with Epworth. On 12 September 2011, Alan Cross
confirmed that Florence and the Machine's second album would
be titled Ceremonials. He also commented on the album by saying,
“I've heard a little more than half the record and it is big, soulful and
powerful. Think Adele or Tori Amos but with some serious Kate Bush
DNA, especially with the rhythm section.”

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Regarding the album's title, Welch told MTV News, “It was an art
installation done in the '70s, this video piece all done on Super 8,
this big procession of kind of coquette-style hippies and all these
different colored robes and masks, and it was all to do with color,
really saturated, brightly colored pastas and balloons. I saw it a
couple years ago, and it was called 'Ceremonials' and then, like,
Roman numerals after it. And the word sort of stuck with me,
and I think the whole idea of performance, and kind of putting
on this outfit and going out almost to find some sort of exorcism
or absolution, to kind of get outside yourself, there's a sense of
ceremony to it.”Welch also revealed that she wanted to call the
album Violence, stating, “I wanted to make an album that sounded
like the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the violence
mixed with the classical Shakespearean drama mixed with the
pop and the pulp, extreme neon stuff.” In an interview with The
Guardian, she described the album as “much bigger” and categorised
its genre as “chamber soul”, a mixture of soul music and chamber
pop.

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Of course, it helps that she a­ ttacks the harp as if she were wielding
an ax. Billboard placed it at number eight on its list of the 10 Best
Albums of 2011, noting that singles “Shake It Out” and “What the
Water Gave Me” “possess an anthemic quality, but they're far from
the only epic moments on the rock-tinged record, which finds Welch
channeling avant-pop luminaries like Annie Lennox and Kate Bush.

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Ceremonials received general acclaim from most music critics. At
Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews
from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of
76, based on 35 reviews.. Laura Foster of Clash magazine called the
album a “confident, cohesive effort” and believed that he steady
hand of Paul Epworth on production has helped Florence to take
the winning formula of her distinctive vocals and melodies.

Entertainment Weekly's Kyle Anderson praised it as a “confident,
unflinching tour de force” and commented, “If her acclaimed 2009
debut, Lungs, was a scrappy shrine to survival and empowerment,
its follow-up is a baroque cathedral, bedecked with ornate tapestries
made of ghostly choirs, pagan-rhythmic splendor, and a whole lot of
harp.

All music critic James Christopher Monger awarded the album
four-and-a-half out of five stars and wrote, “Bigger and bolder than
2009's excellent Lungs, Ceremonials rolls in like fog over the Thames,
doling out a heavy-handed mix of Brit-pop-infused neo-soul anthems
and lush, movie trailer-ready ballads that fuse the bluesy, electro-
despair of Adele with the ornate, gothic melodrama of Kate Bush
and Floodland-era Sisters of Mercy.” Barry Nicolson of the NME
rated the album eight out of ten, arguing that “by taking what
worked about Lungs and amplifying those qualities to a natural,
satisfying conclusion, Florence has made a near-great pop record
that should afford her the creative freedom to do whatever the hell

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Rolling Stone writer Jody Rosen commented that the album
contains “turbulent ballads, powered by booming drums and vocal
chorales rising like distant thunder, full of Welch's banshee wails. The
music touches on Celtic melodies, bluesy rock stomps, nods to goth
and gospel. But the wind never stops howling.” He continued, “This
is a very British record, drawing on a tradition of iconoclastic U.K.
pop that stretches from Kate Bush and Siouxsie and the Banshees
to PJ Harvey.” Margaret Wappler of the Los Angeles Times gave
the album three-and-a-half out of four stars, stating that “Welch
has struck a fantastic and necessary balance. She's found a way
to honor her Bjorkian appetites for lavish orchestral spectacle while
finding the depth and subtlety of her voice.” The Daily Telegraph's
Neil McCormick gave Ceremonials four out of five stars and viewed it
as “a giant, fluid, emotionally resonant album, performed as if Welch's
very sanity is at stake”, adding that “ ontrary to the name she has
given her band, the Machine feel organic and human, providing an
epic, full-blooded soundtrack to Welch's voodoo, in which rhythm,
melody and chanting are employed to drive out neuroses and
insecurities, characterised as ghosts and devils.”

Rob Harvilla of Spin magazine raved that on Ceremonials, Welch 71
is “a bloodied, bloodying songbird in a gilded cage of immaculately
crafted, slow-burn, chest-beating empowerment anthems, gripping
steel bars that her elegantly volcanic voice could shred at any
moment”, while noting that he's so much better than her material
that her material is rendered immaterial.” In a review for The
Observer, Kitty Empire opined that “on the gale-force Ceremonials
the vocals often sound multitracked” and that “ he production is
high-church—harps, bells, shimmers, strings and keyboards that
seem to breed over the course of the album. The cresting choruses

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are never less than heroic. As an arty eccentric, Welch is sometimes
lazily compared to Kate Bush. Here, though, that tenuous link works.
The album's boofing drum sound comes straight out of Bush's 80s
output; on balance, a neat trick.”

Michael Hann of The Guardian concluded that the album “always
sounds wonderful—producer Paul Epworth has created a warm,
soft, four-poster featherbed of sound for Welch to emote over—but
it never really satisfies. One yearns for Welch's wonderful voice to
be delivering lines of more import than the nonsense she's often
delivering here.” Slant Magazine's Matthew Cole wrote that he first
four tracks of Ceremonials are essentially flawless”, but remarked
that the album “can't help but get weaker as it continues, a fact
which owes less to the quality of the songwriting than to the
album's length and a far less dynamic second act.” Andy Gill of
The Independent expressed, n cementing one style, some of the
possibilities offered by Lungs have been choked off. The only time
Welch and The Machine stray from the formula is the Krautrock-
disco motorik of 'Spectrum'; elsewhere, declamatory piano chords
and burring organ underpin the banked, soaring vocals that are her
trademark It's all impressive, though 'Seven Devils', with Halloween-
esque keyboard, overdoes the corny horror melodrama terribly.”

Ceremonials was named the best album of 2011 by Q 73
magazineTime magazine ranked it as the second best album of
2011, stating that espite 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.
Entertainment Weekly, on its list of the 10 Best Albums of 2011, listed
the album at number five and wrote, “A big believer in Red Sea-
parting melodrama, she's got the orchestral ­grandeur to pull it off.

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