Welch’s moves accentuate stirring repertoire

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Florence Welch must be one lousy poker player.

She doesn’t just telegraph her emotions; she hurls them at you like a dodgeball bully targeting some slow-footed kid with glasses.

Her every gesture comes ripened with melodrama and flamboyance.

She’s the kind of lady who would attempt to turn the act of licking a stamp into a command performance or bring some serious blood and thunder to organizing a sock drawer. Bet she even butters toast with righteous aplomb.

As the nucleus of baroque British pop troupe Florence + the Machine, Welch is an irradiated presence, with a wide, glow-in-the-dark smile and the sweeping, highly charged gesticulations of a preacher on the pulpit forecasting a locust front.

At a sold-out Boulevard Pool at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on Saturday, Welch was as entrancing in her movements as a hypnotist’s swinging pocket watch.

She took the stage in a flowing black robe that, with her arms extended, lent her the appearance of a raven with wings outstretched.

She often sang with her eyes closed, and when they were open, she stared up at the sky, perhaps the only thing bigger than her voice.

Welch’s theatrical mannerisms felt like the appropriate physical embodiment of the songs she sang.

Florence + the Machine’s by turns soulful and stirring repertoire treats temperance like an allergen, posited on holding nothing back in terms of sentiment or bombast.

Flanked by a sizable band that included a pair of backing singers and a harpist, Welch often began her songs on a low simmer, her voice threading through tendrils of guitar and slow-building rhythms before eventually climaxing in choruses delivered with a heaving chest.

Lyrically, her tunes often revolved around themes of renewal and growth, love lost and love found.

"I am done with my graceless heart," Welch sang on a triumphant-sounding "Shake it Out," her voice powerful enough to drown out a tornado siren. "So tonight I’m gonna cut it out and then restart."

Equally exultant was "Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up)," a buoyant stadium-pop battle cry that Welch prefaced by enjoining the men in the audience to hoist their ladies onto their shoulders.

During soul sermon "Dog Days Are Over," a foot-stomping riot of feel-good exuberance, Welch led the crowd in pogo-ing up and down until the floor shook like it was positioned above a suddenly awakened fault line.

An equally brassy and breathy mezzo-soprano singer, Welch proved adept at both giving full-throated, octave-scaling voice to Motown-worthy R&B, as she did on over-heated vamp "Lover to Lover," or distilling longing in a husky, sensual purr on torch song "Never Let Me Go."

The connective tissue among these disparate moods was an unadorned emotiveness, which has the potential to register as either brave or overwrought, if played clumsily.

Welch doesn’t veil her feelings in an abundance of metaphors or literary flourishes.

Instead, her message is conveyed as directly as the throb from an exposed nerve ending.

"You want a revelation. You wanna get it right," she sang on a show finale "No Light, No Light," which she began by pounding on a tom-tom. "But it’s a conversation I just can’t have tonight."

But really, by that point, nothing much had been left unsaid any way.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.