Ceremonials

Product Information

The more weight and length (the average is five minutes) given to the songs, the less impact they have and the more wearied they leave you – it’s probably best not to listen to the 20-track deluxe edition in one sitting. The presentation is stunning and it proves that a record doesn’t have to be color vinyl to be a cool release visually as the packaging is really gorgeous, and both discs on my copy have dead silent backgrounds. During an interview with MTV News, Welch discussed the nature of the tour, saying, "In a way, it's not going to be too big a production; we've done a lot of quite extravagant stuff, and that's been amazing, but for this tour, it's definitely going to be about showcasing the music [. The band premiered four tracks from the album—"Only If for a Night", " Never Let Me Go", "Heartlines" and " Spectrum"—at The Creators Project, a partnership between Vice and Intel, in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighbourhood on 15 October 2011.

Ceremonials is so hell-bent on providing such "bright moments"-- that flash of overwhelming emotion resulting from ramped-up strings or a frantic harp or a particularly audacious vocal run-- that it never zooms out to consider its own listenability.But by the midway point of the LP, its endless crescendos start bleeding into each other, and the loudness soon tires itself out.

Billboard placed it at number eight on its list of the 10 Best Albums of 2011, noting that "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.They performed "Shake It Out" and "What the Water Gave Me" on the Canal+ show La Musicale in France on 18 November. No matter what type of music you like to listen to please give this album a go, you will not be disappointed. 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. 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. AllMusic critic James Christopher Monger 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.

Lungs was an album that took you on a journey from the sublime to the quirky and back again it never followed a pattern or a straight line and at times felt whacky and out of sync which was what made it brilliant it had a sense of heart and was exciting and something different at a time when music seemed to be on the slide, what Ceremonials is is a beautiful evocative huge sounding album that draws you in and builds and builds and builds leaving you at once exhilarated and breathless the problem is there are are no moments where she takes a sharp left and throws in a kiss with a fist song she never quite shakes the bottle and makes things explode like on lungs, its much more straight lined and clear cut with a more solid identity and self assurance as to what kind of album it is but its saving grace is that she has progressed she hasn't made a lungs 2. The album also debuted at number one in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, [99] [100] [101] and was certified gold by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) in its first week of sales. 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. Very real lyrics combined with diverse compositions make her stand out among her contemporaries and the bonus disc also shows she's just as good without the technology,which is rare nowadays.

After trying out a few different producers and styles-- garage-pop; vampy twinkle-pop; and tribal, mystic-pop-- on her debut, Lungs, Welch settles almost exclusively on the latter for Ceremonials, bringing along producer Paul Epworth, who was so good at the mystic stuff on the first record, to oversee the whole thing. Ceremonials debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling approximately 38,000 copies in its first two days of release and 94,050 copies altogether in its first week.

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. The Daily Telegraph 's Neil McCormick viewed Ceremonials as "a giant, fluid, emotionally resonant album" and stated, "Contrary 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.There is a change of tempo from their previous album, but this just adds a new dimension and enjoyment for the listener.