Florist – Jellywish – For Folk’s Sake

Florist seem determined to go gently into existential chaos on their new album, Jellywish. Attacking personal problems like joy, pain, life, death, reality and relationships, Emily Sprague and her bandmates, Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker and Felix Walworth, struggle with some of the largest issues imaginable at the same time. Is it possible to break free from our own thoughts and the pedestrian way of life we seem to be living? Doing all this, with some of the gentlest yet most inspiring music imaginable, makes this band, now 12-years on from their first EP, one that should be watched closely.

They don’t as much strike chords as embrace them, gently matching them to moods and moments before tumbling into bigger concepts. Keyboards and guitar kiss each other, while Sprague tries to unravel huge concepts on ‘Have Heaven’. As she relates, we live in a very big world where we populate a very small part, “So soon, we’ll be nothing/ But a cartoon floating though the universe/ Does it feel like everything is melting here?/ Are we giving up now?” Yet at the same time there is another world, one much closer to home. “It’s winter and the garden is dying/ But the light comes through the naked trees/ Have you heard?/ I wanna be your fistful of the morning dirt.” Keeping both those balls spinning in the same song requires a most interesting sense of perception.

The gently plucked guitars of ‘Levitate’ compliment Sprague’s voice, especially when strategically deployed synthesisers shyly play at the edges of the song. This is when you begin to realise that these four individuals, having played together for so long seem to have a sixth sense about how to frame songs in a way that keeps the mystery from overwhelming the beauty of each track. It’s as if they are afraid to play too much or too hard because there’s a fragility just below the surface.

Sprague has mentioned that Jellywish is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing and multifaceted. It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.” Amidst interpersonal relationships we are crammed in a place that can be quite inhospitable. Yet Florist finds a way to go gently into that dark night with guitars strumming on ‘Moon, Sea, Devil’. “Isn’t it all just impossible timing?/ Every day I try, then I fail/ Isn’t that all we’re doing here?”

With more questions than answers, Florist seem to find a way to be okay with not having all the answers. At the end of the day the relationship between two people may be bigger than the world, if only because that little world makes the bigger one bearable. Jellywish packs a punch by not punching at all. This is our world for better or worse. While Florist don’t have all the answers, tending to their garden seems to make the world a bit more accommodating.