No Space Among The Clouds

Florence and the Machine “Lover to Lover”

Florence and the Machine are generally considered to be a secular act, but their new album sounds like straight-ahead modern gospel, complete with overt references to God, salvation and transcendence. It’s modern gospel, for sure, and the religion manifests itself in agnostic-friendly ways – you don’t really need to buy into too much dogma to relate to her singing about feeling like she’s going to be denied salvation because she’s been making too many mistakes. The point of divergence, really, is in that she sings about feeling good about her hedonistic ways with the same ecstatic intensity as when she gushes about deliverance later on in the album. There’s a lot of faith in this music, but that yearning for the divine gets mixed in with a true passion for the glories and foibles of being merely human.

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