What started in 1991 as a small acoustic-only offering by a local radio station has grown over the decades into an alternative rock spectacular. ALT 105’s annual one-day winter show Not So Silent Night features the biggest names in rock and its various sects, and this year’s show at the SAP Center is no different. Featuring Death Cab for Cutie, Bastille, Florence and the Machine, Young the Giant, Chvrches, The Struts and many more, the annual Not So Silent Night festival has become a staple of the musically inclined Bay Area holiday season.

Not So Silent Night
Sat, 6:30pm, $26+
SAP Center, San Jose

Like a whole generation of art-pop icons from the 1980s—Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Grace Slick—UK singer Florence Welch, who performs as Florence and the Machine at Shoreline on Oct. 5, strikes a delicate balance between tense, over-the-top theatrical rock and infectious, bread-and-butter pop hooks. But she has something her forebears didn’t—acute vocal precision, the kind that singers with vocal coaches at the age of two have. Yet her voice has a natural, classical soul undertone that would impress Adele.

That’s no shortage of influences for one singer. Yet, it’s a perfect fit for her band, Florence and the Machine, which offers a hodge-podge of musical styles and gets described as art-pop mostly by default. They embrace bits of garage-rock, tribal music and angelic overtures, well, at least on the first Florence and the Machine album, Lungs. The 2011 follow-up, Ceremonials dropped the garage and dance sounds and instead focused solely on harp-strumming, operatic music.

The neo-Enya, art-pop gem is an entirely different beast than the band’s first single, “Kiss with a Fist,” which introduced the band in 2008 with an angry three-chord dance-punk jam that could almost pass for an Alanis Morissette breakup anthem.

Lungs came out a year later and became huge in the UK—like Oasis huge—staying on the Top 40 charts there for 65 consecutive weeks as the top selling album in 2009 and in 2010. The U.S. audience is a little behind, but the massive hit “Dog Days Are Over” quickly erased any lag.

Florence and the Machine headlines Shoreline Amphitheater, a venue with the magnitude to truly display the mesmerizing, grandiose nature of Florence and the Machine and its ascent.