Florist’s debut, The Birds Outside Sang, was written while songwriter Emily Sprague recovered from severe injuries to her arm and neck. Holed up in her Brooklyn apartment, she crafted a set of very pretty, fragile lo-fi indie tracks that struck an emotional chord with critics and fans. This kind of bedroom indie is probably the most overpopulated genre in the world right now, other than maybe trap rap, but Florist stands out from the crowd due to Sprague’s tranquil soundscapes, poetic lyrics and emotional honesty.
The tracks are usually based around only a single guitar or organ line, occasionally accentuated with subtle sound effects and accents created by synthesisers. The brittle music allows Sprague’s subdued voice and intimate lyrics to be the focus of the tracks. Her lyrics use a lot of natural imagery, frequently using plants, light and colour in her metaphors describing subjects like mental health and the body. This combined with her soft voice lends the music an oddly innocent and inquisitive mood that combines with the inherent sadness of her subject matter to create an oddly hopeful atmosphere. While it required a full sentence to put into words, this feeling of simultaneous melancholia and optimism is very relatable when expressed by Sprague. These characteristics are all present on If Blue Could Be Happiness, but the songwriting is much tighter and more refined and Sprague’s subject matter has shifted from the isolation and listlessness she experienced while injured, to a much more palpable grief at the sudden death of her mother.
This added emotional weight definitely makes the lows of this album much lower, but despite this, the inherent hopefulness of Florist is stronger than ever. The music is always very pretty, subtle and inoffensive, but has a lot of colour and vibrancy due to the warmth of the recording and the synthesiser accents. Sprague’ lyrics use more specific motifs, most notably the colour blue which features on almost every track. While this could get repetitive quickly, Sprague employs it in a different metaphor every time, giving it a range of meanings that allows the listener to interpret what they’re hearing. Light is also an important motif in both its presence when Sprague sings of wanting to glow when she next sees her mother, to its absence such as when she sings ‘darkness won’t allow you to show you who I am’ on ‘Glowing Brightly’.
If Blue Could Be Happiness will definitely please Florist fans and hopefully gain them new ones, but the tighter songwriting means that the meandering, free-form instrumental and spoken word segments that appeared on their debut are absent this time around, which takes away one of my favourite things about Florist. But overall this is a minor issue when considering that the songs that are here are consistently great when taken on their own, all embodying that strange melancholic hope that only Florist can tap in to, best described by this line from the opener: “If you’re terrified of living like me then I hope you’ll be fine because we’re terrified together in this terrifying time”. Florist is here to lovingly remind us that we’re alive, just figuring it out as we go along and hoping that everything will be OK in the end.
7/10
Words by Jack Hollis