#DGE feels out of place on this record in that regard bc it's a power anthem without the desperation that Florence is known for

[oliviasoddessey]

No bc Dream Girl Evil coming right after Girls Against God is so. There's an artifice to DGE and maybe I'm just not used to Florence Being Sexy (as opposed to Being Horny, which is what Bedroom Hymns was, and was another thing entirely) and it's also 90% just my state of mind rn but DGE coming straight after the song which opens with "What a thing to admit that when someone looks at me with real love I don't like it very much it kind of makes me feel like I'm being crushed", going from "crying into cereal at midnight" to "walk on water just to kiss me"... it's SUCH a shift and it feels like the personification of the seesaw ego of the artist or that thing where you're simultaneously a mess and the sexiest woman alive, and after "a golden heart or a golden voice", DGE feels like putting up this sexy, unattainable persona so that no one will get close enough to you to create the claustrophobia to "real love". It's like she's saying "you thought I was nice? FUCK YOU I'm evil and I'm not perfect like you thought I was" to a person who just wants to go on a second date. This is just my current state of mind talking now, but that song being where it is adds this layer of accusing someone of idealising you when they actually have a very accurate idea of your beauty and your flaws, but you just find it so difficult to believe anyone could ever really love you if they knew what a bad person you were. It's Florence (or the speaker, really) dragging out this "don't come crying/I am nobody's moral centre" in response to nobody morally centring you, it's creating a femme fatale of herself just so that she can slip away into the night and tell herself that they femme fatale'd her so it was never going to work out anyway. You know? Sometimes a super sexy persona has nothing to do with getting laid and everything to do with everyone looking at you while being too intimidated to actually talk to you which saves you having to talk to them.