Florist Balances the Mundane and the Cosmic in ‘Jellywish’
Photo by V Haddad.
Florist is a band that is not afraid to get complicated. The four-piece has long painted picturesque sonic landscapes and dug deep into lofty themes and in their fourth full-length album, Jellywish, the band invites listeners into a nuanced and delicately fantastical world, offering listeners comfort among the confusion of life.
A friendship project that started in Upstate New York in 2013, Florist has been a constant in the indie folk scene for over a decade. Their heavenly and minimalist sound creates a warm atmosphere that is often at odds with their songs’ existential lyrics. Lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Emily Sprague said Jellywish is “a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing and multifaceted.”
This sentiment is immediately present in the album’s opening track, “Levitate.” Aside from a brief, gentle piano line and soft flute trills in the post-chorus, Sprague’s voice is otherwise only accompanied by a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, forcing her contemplative storytelling to the forefront. “Everyday I wake, wait for the tragedy / Imbalanced humanity / Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere?” she sings, bluntly posing the overarching question Jellywish explores: How can we attempt to find true fulfillment in the vastness and monotony of life?
Watch the music video for “Have Heaven” on YouTube.
With its whimsical production and disorienting lyrics, track two and lead single “Have Heaven” throws listeners into the ether. Layered guitar lines adorned with grace notes and light toms set the dream-like scene before Sprague’s velvety vocals get added to the mystifying texture. As dissonant harmonies, vocal reverberations and a tambourine usher in the chorus, all sense of reality is lost. Sprague begins counting, “I could have a heavy two / I could have a heaven three,” and so on, dragging listeners down the rabbit hole with her until she gets to six and we return to a verse.
“Have Heaven” serves as an example of the album’s foundation in the natural world. “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,” Sprague sings in verse two. Whether or not Florist is actually advising us to “touch grass,” mentions of the outside world seem to ground the album in reality when its philosophical exploration becomes too fantastical. For instance, the nature-heavy tracks “All The Same Light” and “Sparkle Song” follow “This Was A Gift,” a single with existentialist lyrics like “Only the dead survive.”
“All The Same Light” opens with a 16-second static and high-pitched theremin-sounding fade-in before a simple acoustic chord progression enters, as if bringing the song back down to Earth. The track itself lives in a space between the abstract and the concrete, with lyrics oscillating between physical and hypothetical spaces: “Arizona, I go there and keep going / Sunrise in LA / I wonder which direction does your bedroom face / Can you feel the side of the eye that looks back?”
With its reminders to cherish the little things, “Sparkle Song” offers the most complete answers to the big questions Jellywish asks and plants listeners' feet on the ground. Lyrics like “Isn’t it amazing that we get to share this life / I worry about the future / For now you’re walking by my side” and “It’s raining on a Monday / White rice and sweet potatoes / Something simply makes you happy” provide the much-needed reminders that human connection is a treasure and finding comfort in the mundane can be healing. The interval-jumping, articulate guitar line that dances in the background feels like sitting around a campfire, the fingerpicking like embers.
Photo by V Haddad.
Where “Sparkle Song” ends with Sprague singing “Sparkles in the morning / Today the sun is shining / You look at the shadows / I hope you see something better,” the following track, “Moon, Sea, Devil,” lends itself to twilight reflection: “In the darkness of night I look outside / Is there anyone there / Can I see through the veil?”
This mistier tone is what initially drew me to Florist a couple months ago when I heard “Riding Around In The Dark,” the band’s contribution to the I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack. I can’t help but believe the Jellywish track “Started To Glow” was intended for the film. Besides its “glowing” title, “Started To Glow” paints a narrative similar to the themes and scenes of the movie, which allegorically explores the experiences of transgender individuals. The lyrics, “You cut your hair off and you started to glow,” clearly seem to reference when — spoiler alert — Maddy, complete with a mullet, returns to the real world after figuring out she’s actually a character in the fictional TV show “The Pink Opaque.” In the film, returning to the TV world is a metaphor for coming out as queer, in Maddy’s case, and transitioning, in Owen’s case, and the only way to go between realities is to bury themselves alive. The song’s final lyrics, “Are you the single voice I have always heard / When will we fall down and become the dirt,” parallel how Owen never goes back to being Isabel in “The Pink Opaque,” never transitions.
Jellywish’s closing track, “Gloom Designs,” brings the album full circle. The contemplative song, interspersed with brief sounds of static and rain, explores the human condition in its rawest form. In one final question, Sprague asks, “Can you love the cloud just floating around?” And in one final answer, she offers, “Jellyfish, no brain but a wish / Classic decimation ends.” While she seemingly means that the human tendency to dream of a certain future without making a change will be our downfall, perhaps the abstraction of the lyrics is the point. Florist has offered the questions, but to answer them requires personal introspection and a whole lot of dreaming.