A production with lots of heavy delay/reverb like this is a fairly rare beast these days, so it’s interesting to consider how the mix engineer (Spike Stent in this case) seems to have endeavoured to avoid the sonics dissolving into a washy mess. Firstly, notice that although the drums, pads and backing vocals are thick with reverb, the lead vocal doesn’t appear to be. Based on the lack of vocal reverb in the stereo Sides signal and the rather truncated-sounding effect tail audible at some phrase ends (such as “way” at 0:49), I’d guess that the main time-domain effect on the lead probably consists of a short, low-feedback, tempo-sync’ed delay. As a result, Florence naturally maintains some distance from The Machine in the mix’s front-to-back dimension.

The fact that the pads and reverb/ambience all seem to be very wide also helps with vocal intelligibility in mono, as a lot of that stereo information simply cancels out when the stereo channels are summed, causing a big drop in the prominence of those backing elements in the balance. The stereo Sides signal reveals a distinct loss of low end below about 70Hz as well, which leads me to think that the rolling bass-drum timbre is more a product of borderline-lunatic close-mic compression abuse than of low-frequencies from stereo overhead/room mics or reverb effects — I presume that high-pass filtering was probably applied fairly liberally to prevent too much LF ambience muddying the low octaves.

As for the drums themselves, although the reverb/ambience level in the mix is high, the effect sound is short and quite bright (a bit like a medium-sized stone room, to my ears) so that it doesn’t clutter the mix with a huge tail and is also more subjectively audible at a given mix level than the duller reverbs that you might typically use for general-purpose ‘behind the scenes’ mix blending. Some kind of dynamics processing is also probably helping with the kick/snare ‘cut-through’ too, because their hits both appear to be ducking the drum overheads/ambience fairly heavily, as evidenced by the strange reverse-envelope character on the cymbal accents. It’s tricky to speculate as to how this ducking has been implemented (it could be anything from simple mix-bus compression to some complicated side-chain concoction), but whatever’s doing it seems to be releasing quite quickly (a setting of 50ms or so, at a guess), which means that the gain-pumping isn’t as as audible as it might have been.

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A complete mixing method based around the techniques of the world's most famous producers.

I critiqued this production based on the version on her album 'Ceremonials', which gives the following credits:

Produced by Paul Epworth.
Engineered by Mark Rankin.
Mixed by Mark 'Spike' Stent.
Mastered by Ted Jensen.

One thing that hits me every time I listen to this track is that the lead vocal line from 2:52 through to the final chorus always seems to sound like's it's been stuck on as an afterthought. The main reason for this, I think, is that the amount of low midrange in the tone somehow suddenly increases there. I'd probably have multed that bit out to give it some extra low cut there -- or maybe even automated an EQ, because the falsetto bits seem to suffer much more than the rest in this regard.

Also, speaking of the vocals, it's also probably worth mentioning how vocal distortion appears to have been used pretty extensively here too. This is often justifiable on grounds of giving the vocal a fuller tone to compete with such a rich-sounding backing texture, but I have a suspicion that it might also have been a way of managing the intermittent narrowband frequency peaks that often, in my experience, tend to accompany this kind of strained vocal delivery. Such peaks result in a sporadic 'piercing' quality that can make it quite difficult to achieve a stable subjective tone and balance for the vocal in the mix -- the slim frequency peak stabs you uncomfortably in the ear well before rest of the vocal's frequency spectrum feels loud enough. Distortion can work as something of a remedy to this by increasing the vocal sound's overall harmonic density so that the narrow-band peaks don't stand out quite as much. In this respect it's quite interesting to compare this Spike Stent mix with Craig Silvey's of 'What The Water Gave Me' from the same album. Although I like Silvey's extra bit rock-and-roll 'edge' in general, for my money Stent handles the resonances of Florence's vocal better, such that she seems closer and more solid to my ears most of the time, but without ever becoming as abrasive as during 'What The Water Gave Me' (for example at 2:10-2:22).

For more critiques of commercial productions, browse The Mix Review Index.

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Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio
A complete mixing method based around the techniques of the world's most famous producers.