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Welcome to the latest installment of ZIO's newest weekly series, Late to the Party, in which we catch you up on what everybody - from staff writers at the top outlets to the bloggers hiding in their mothers' basements - has been saying about a rising artist.

This week's subject: the inimitable Florence and the Machine, whose Mercury Prize-nominated debut, Lungs, was released in the United States two weeks ago.

People keep trying to box up Florence Welch.

Ever since the 23-year-old English singer-songwriter and her tremendous voice burst onto London's music scene a few years ago, critics and bloggers have done their damnedest to find another female artist to compare her to.

Kate Bush? Maybe only in her most fanciful moments.

Kate Nash? Only on one song.

Lily Allen? (Lily's voice coaches wish)

PJ Harvey? (...Maybe?)

Amy Winehouse? (...Let's just move on)

Like most artist-to-artist comparisons, these manage to be both misleading and flattering. Welch hasn't made nearly enough music to warrant comparisons to either Bush or Harvey, and the Winehouse and Allen tie-ins are based purely on the fact that all three artists are female, British, and recently popular.

But even if none of these characterizations quite fits, the flattery behind them is deserved. The music on Welch's ambitious, impressive debut album, Lungs, which was favored by many to win the 2009 Mercury Prize,  swoops from pointed ("Between Two Lungs"; "Drumming Song") to epic and rushing ("Cosmic Love") to poppy ("You've Got the Love"), and its dramatic range is compelling.

The album's range comes partly from the variety of producers who worked on it (Paul Epworth [producer for Bloc Party, Kate Nash], Steve Mackey [formerly of Pulp], James Ford [currently of Simian Mobile Disco]), but mainly it serves as a reflection of Welch's powerful, showy voice. She bursts upwards and outwards just as easily as she flutters back down to earth, and on record, she has one of the most impressive voice you're likely to hear on radio.

On stage, she sometimes sounds unsure of how to harness all her powers (see below), but her ability to grab an audience by the hair with a single note at least proves that her vocal fireworks aren't the result of studio magic.

So as one of the only women left in pop who can really sing and really write songs, why won't critics let Welch be herself?

It's likely that gender plays a large role. The male critics that still dominate media tend to group female artists into a kind of separate, other category; one of the few reviews that refused to fall back on hopeless name-dropping was written by a woman, and an otherwise solid Drowned in Sound reviewer couldn't resist a wry comment on the double standard that tends to plague female pop artists: 

"I will be following this paragraph," DiS's Ed Miller smirks, "with a section comparing Florence And The Machine (and not her music, mind, because she is a girl, and so we’re going to go mainly on style), to other contemporary female artists, namely La Roux, who has red hair (‘roux’ means ‘red’ in French), and Little Boots, who is little, and presumably has a corresponding shoe size."

That might seem like a ludicrous thing to do for an artist who, just three years into her career, has already played at Glastonbury. But it's also got precious little to do with one of pop music's biggest, most beguiling voices.