If there’s one theme that runs through the music of Florence + The Machine, it’s that you have to go through the dark to get to the light. Sometimes it’s spelled out directly — “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” “We all have a hunger,” “Dog days are over” — and sometimes it’s simply woven deeply into the fabric of the songs. Feel-good music that doesn’t ignore the bad, and sometimes even foregrounds it, should be a difficult balance to maintain. Friday night at TD Garden, Florence + The Machine made it look almost impossibly easy.
It helped that the songs were imbued with a sense of the dramatic ably delivered by the nine-piece band. Opening with the slow, sinuous “June” was a bold gambit, but the song was captivating, and “South London Forever” rose bit by bit throughout. Dionne Douglas’s violin in “Only If for a Night” carried the weight of an orchestra all by itself, while drummer Loren Humphrey and percussionist Aku Orraca-Tetteh provided a percussive thump in the midsection of “100 Years” so huge that a drum mallet went flying high into the air when it started.
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And at the center was singer Florence Welch, charging across the stage in her bare feet, occasionally pausing mid-bound to twist her body into modern dance moves or simply twirl in her pale green chiffon dress. By now, it’s firmly established that Welch’s voice is practically a force of nature, so powerful that it occasionally got away from her like a wild horse in the band’s early days. No longer. Her bellows, moans, and ethereal howls were all under her control but still capable of expressing a seemingly bottomless empathy.
As a result, “Hunger” found Welch not so much confessing as sermonizing, and she fed off of what she referred to as the audience’s “really juicy, feminine energy.” It built through the end of the concert; the three-part backing vocals in the lovely “The End of Love” added a new, gorgeous dimension at a point in the show where another band might be out of new tricks, and Welch ran out onto the packed standing-room floor during “Delilah” to jump and sing with the crowd as the band provided a powerful, sharp bounce like the Shangri-Las under the spell of Kate Bush. The closing “Shake It Out” brought all of Florence + The Machine’s moody uplift to its peak, and the gold glitter that had just been dropped simply hung in the air, uneager to fall to earth.
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Openers Grizzly Bear managed to be ghostly and cockeyed yet anthemic and dramatic, and while their songs occasionally drifted into oblivion, they were also capable of harnessing their airy sound into something propulsive, like Roxy Music writ large.
Florence + The Machine
With Grizzly Bear
At: TD Garden, Friday
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Twitter @spacecitymarc