• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Jul 13, 2022 Web Exclusive By Mark Moody

After 2019’s solo release, Emily Alone, Florist leader Emily Sprague invited her band to join her on a month long exploration of sounds—both created and captured. Recorded live to tape during sessions that often took place on the porch of a house in the Hudson Valley, the nearly hour long self-titled album captures impromptu takes along with sounds blended in from the woods around them. Recorded in the summer of 2019, the album alternates between brief instrumentals and longer-form songs with vocals. It’s as if someone took the later recorded Adrianne Lenker’s separate songs and instrumentals albums and gave them a few good riffle shuffles.

The 19-track album unfolds like objects pulled and studied from an unearthed chest found buried deep in the woods. The initial trepidation that ensues from the quivering instrumental opener, “June 9th Nighttime,” finally gives way to the daybreak wonder of “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning).” The song finds Sprague reflecting on the lives left behind in her mother’s passing, but from a perspective of peaceful acceptance that envisions Sprague and her father moving forward. An immensely gentle album that needs to be taken as a whole, tracks with titles like “Duet for Guitar and Rain” or “Bells Pt.’s 1, 2, and 3” deliver on their descriptions as tender transitions between Sprague’s clear headed observations.

Appearing in the latter half of the album, “Sci-Fi Silence” makes for Florist’s most stunning moment. The title phrase itself evokes an aural image, but the mix of distant sounding synth notes matched up with Sprague’s most unadorned vocal passages in the first half of the song are beauty personified in song. Evolving as it goes, the back-end of the track finds Sprague both pining for love lost, but also welcoming the process of experiencing the same. While rare arcs of more impassioned passages like the solar flared arcing of electric guitar on “43” or the delayed kick-in of drums on other tracks, embraces a feel for tackling whatever life may bring. “I know I am strong,” Sprague sings repeatedly on the tightly harmonized “Organ’s Drone,” finding a quiet power in songs sung together and the innate energy derived from creating something precious. Florist delicately captures the place and time in which it was born and then sets it free from Sprague’s cupped hands as something to behold as wondrous. (www.florist.life)

Author rating: 9/10