Florist, like Mount Eerie and Elliott Smith before them, write music scored by heavy feelings, existential ideas, and the confrontation of mortality that, again, paints the corners of their latest record, Jellywish. Similar to the title’s mythic creation—a clash between a jellyfish’s liquidity and a wish’s intangibility and optimism—Jellywish exists in a space between extremes: life and death, joy and sadness, acceptance and denial. It’s a fabled place where these ideas can exist together in totality.
The New York-based folk quartet have known each other for over a decade. Endearingly described as a “friendship project” by bandleader Emily Sprague, Florist is the musical connection between her, Rick Spataro (bass/keys/engineer), Jonnie Baker (guitar), and Felix Walworth (drummer). The band didn’t fully bloom until 2015, upon the release of their excellent EP Holdly, but since then, their cup has been filled with five full-lengths, each of them building upon the intricacies and humanism of the last. Jellywish comes two-and-a-half years after Florist, a 19-track effort that found the band at their strongest and most hopeful, thanks to autobiographical songs like “Red Bird Pt. 2” and “Sci-Fi Silence” and the sample-motivated ambition of “Spring in Hours” and “Dandelion.”
Dropping the strictly ambient textures of Florist, Jellywish is a minimalist folk wonderland, making time for flourishes of robust instrumentalism and deeply meditative lyrics tilting towards life’s one certainty: uncertainty. These new songs are intimate in a manner that feels like a late-night existential conversation between close friends. This is reflected by the sparse arrangements from Sprague, Spataro, Walworth, and Baker, whose movements on the record mimic the mood in sound like a radio playing softly in the background, coloring in the pauses. The production is lightly touched, but the record leans greatly into Florist’s best asset: Sprague’s confessional songwriting. While some of the verses get jumbled in her stream-of-consciousness style, the stories still disarm, ache, and impress.
We are windswept into Sprague’s diarism by delicate acoustic picking and her own airy croons. “Levitate” opens with questions of purpose, love, and pain—overarching themes Sprague has grappled with throughout her career: “Every day I wake / Wait for the tragedy / Imbalanced humanity / Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere / Is this life too long? / Or too short to have no want phenomenon,” she sings. It’s undoubtedly a blunt opener, but a scan, too, of hard truths on a record full of them.
The whimsy of “Have Heaven” is baked into curious structures of harp-like guitars and tender hand-drumming. The song, cinematic like an adventure film’s opening sequence, sets the scene with the anticipatory question, “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?” In this story, the adventure is life itself, which is grand indeed. The pseudo title track, “Jellyfish,” strips the songcraft back before filtering in sounds of a babbling brook accompanied by a soft rhythmic section, giving balmy support to Sprague singing, “Nothing is guaranteed but death.” It’s grim but honest, evoking the commotion and distractions of life’s inexplicable destinations.
“Started to Grow” prolongs the album’s consuming conversations around death while adding small observations of joy and gratitude that gnaw away the cynicism, as Sprague’s image of “It’s freezing cold / I just walked past a tree / The ice looks like a beautiful face staring up” sharpen her focus on the duality of joy and discomfort. Jellywish, like Florist, runs softer than the efforts of the band’s past releases, like Emily Alone, but “Started to Grow” employs a segment of soft piano work from Spataro, whose fingers touch the keys so lightly, as if he’s afraid they may break. An antidote to harshness, Florist create escapism through the bubbly, raw-hemmed soundscapes of non-linear sound effects and stringed percussion. These flairs fill the recesses of Jellywish’s ambient spaces with colorful, storybook imagination, though Sprague’s stories sound anything but fictitious.
Sprague delivers the best line of the album during “This Was a Gift”: “Only the dead survive,” she suggests, pointing to how the parts of ourselves we leave behind are what makes us eternal. “Love is the final piece to this.” On a record like Jellywish, a product pulled apart by death—something Sprague says she is tired of singing about in the title track—sews us back to life. A rich, bittersweet acoustic tone rings through the intro of “All The Same Light,” as Florist gesture towards a more digitized crunch through spacey, electric distortion. The noise reboots and reframes the album, as the band file into each other, using their long-held synchronicity to flutter across jam segments and in-tune cadence switches.
Though Jellywish pales narrative big feelings with touches of compositional sparseness, “Sparkle Song” (and much of side two) offers a blanket of light that is properly proportioned with Sprague’s songwriting. “Isn’t it amazing / That we get to share this life / I worry about the future / For now you’re walking by my side / There’s no evil in your eyes,” she sings, embracing love even through disaster. “Moon, Sea, Devil” plumbs the good, bad, and ugly parts of existing with Sprague declaring “I want to be family with you / So that means I give it up to the chaos.” “Our Hearts in a Room” relishes sentimentality with the line “A lot of pain / A lot to give away / You in love / Looks a lot like / You just standing in the sun,” and, with Walworth harmonizing, it’s the only track to feature vocals outside of Sprague’s. “Our Hearts in a Room” is a literal and metaphorical demonstration of support and community that is our only way to cope with a severe existence.
“Gloom Designs” brings Jellywish full circle, arriving as both an ode to one of Sprague’s lost friends and to how the world beats on in spite of heartache. “It’s been a long time since we laughed until we cried / It’s been a short time in the entirety of life,” she sings, holding on to past connections tightly as hisses of feedback rub against a finger-picked melody. The song is not a particularly dismal or hopeful conclusion, but rather a radical acceptance of the hand we’re dealt by getting the chance to live. Jellywish does not demand answers to life’s irreversible griefs and endings. Like most of Florist’s music, “Gloom Designs” is remarkably at peace with the world around it.
Olivia Abercrombie is Brooklyn-based music and culture writer. When she is not reviewing albums or interviewing artists you can find her ranting on Twitter (@o_abercrombie) about Survivor or making terrible jokes on Letterboxd.
