17 year-old London-based singer-songwriter/flower crown aficionado Olivia Colette – under the moniker Flower Fellow – has crafted a state of quiet wonder in ‘Madman’, making use of the plaintive, fathomless hollow of her voice to create a cathartic, utterly transportive elegy to the fettered states of the past.
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A lightly tempered strain of lilting chords and gently teased strings make up an amply emotive framework upon which to hang the mellifluous gulfs and reaches of Colette’s voice. Comparisons to the often elemental intensity of Florence Welch and the razor-edged poeticism of Marika Hackman are warranted, as Flower Fellow employs both with mesmeric ease, though her sound is most intimately furnished by her own, ever-so tenderly frayed lyricism and murmurous, complex spirit.
Lyrics such as “The politics of feeling is a waiting game / Tell me why are you still bleeding at the sound of your name?” demonstrate the vivid capacity for slightly bruised, yet empathically-wrent imagery Flower Fellow so capriciously exercises, before giving way to a refrain that causes the song to shudder and split at its very seams. “Dance, my darling / dance”, as much a pointed, perhaps even bitter command at the endless twirling of a memory as it is an invitation for freedom and abandon, closes out the quiet majesty of ‘Madman’ with a silently trembling roar at the starlit sky, at the still water, at the high wind bristling through great sprawling groves – whatever the madness of your heart demands. A soft, dexterously-twined joy.
Words by Tom Grantham
@_katelush