This is probably rather unkind of me
It might well be wrong too – after all, my musical experience got me to Grade 8, which I failed twice, then gave up. And yet:
As the other half of Florence + the Machine, Isabella Summers plays stadiums and works with the likes of Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson. Now the film world can’t get enough of the musical sensation
The Florence bit, hell of a pair of lungs there and who doesn’t like a redhead? But I’ve always thought the songs themselves were the weak bit.
Perhaps this is just personal taste but they annoy me in the same way that jazz noodling does (say, from sorta the Dudley Moore Trio-style stuff onwards, although there’s some part of their stuff I do like). Might be musically very accomplished, in fact is, but there’s no “there” there. Possibly great atmospherics but no structure to them.
I tend to think that a song should be, well, a song. Bit like a story – we want a beginning, middle, end, a structure. Possibly this is also why I dislike so much “literary” writing because so much of that is done for the effect of the words themselves and so little on that being a story bit.
OK, fair play, this is just a grumpy old man view but it is mine. I have indeed heard Florence and the Machine on radio and so on. And my reaction has long been great lungs there, could do better with the songs. Shrug.