Florence + the MachineMarlay Park, Dublin\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
Four songs into Florence + the Machine<\/a> at Marlay Park<\/a> on Sunday, people begin to act strangely. Girls ascend to the shoulders of boys, creating that most terrifying of gig creature: the two-headed vision-blocker with a trance-like obliviousness to those in their wake. What kind of sorcery is this? The Florence Welch<\/a> kind.<\/p>\n \u201cWould anyone like to make an offering? Would anyone like to be an offering?\u201d she asks as she introduces her early-career delight Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up). If you simply must be sacrificed in a folk-horror ritual, you\u2019d want this fluttering triumph to be the soundtrack.<\/p>\n The shoulder-dwellers soon return to earth with us mere mortals, her spell broken, but Welch has long leaned into a witch aesthetic, and this incitement, along with a choreographic sequence in which she appears to have murdered her dancers, hints at the possibility that she might not always use her powers for good.<\/p>\n Seventeen years on from the release of Lungs, her debut album, Welch remains an artist born for the largest of stages. She might press her palms against the air as if trapped behind a pane of glass, but her vocals are unconfined, and they resonate across the summer-evening air with an oaky richness few can match.<\/p>\n