Adam Green delights in the uncanny and the unexpected, so ‘Engine of Paradise’ has a few more tricks up its sleeve. The best of these is, of course, Florence Welch’s guest vocals. It’s an unusual call to have the actual Flo on your album and not ask her to do a verse or two of her own, but (you may recall) Adam Green knows what works for Adam Green. In any case, having Florence do backing vocals is a bit like getting Jimi Hendrix to play rhythm guitar. With her vocal contributions, album closer ‘
Reasonable Man’ goes from being a sweetly plaintive musing on oddity, technology and identity to something more staggeringly cinematic. If ‘Engine of Paradise’ is our future, then it might not be so bleak after all.
