TUNES // Florist – Shadow Bloom

Post by Tommy

my apartment in queens doesnt have a window in the living room but it has a deep, focused skylight that stretches sunbeams leisurely across the apartment, one long sweep from morning to evening. the clouds are raining gently down on it as i sit on the couch to write, tinkling in faint mimicry of my fingers on the keyboard.

deeply metered and yet subject to the natural minute chaos of handling small materials with one’s hands, the gentle motion of the fingerpicked guitars as they arrive in “shadow bloom” sounds like the rain on the skylight to me, swelling and carrying steadily to the end of the song.

a lot of music likes to glorify and aestheticize apathy, but florist have always carried with them a solid, gallant calm in the face of dark things. it’s never inaction— to me, it sounds like the opposite, an understated power and commitment to peace and care born out of an implicit trust in the natural (frequently super-natural) world.

florist’s emily sprague sings “If I could see the future / I would lay down / Eat a tangerine / And make a cup of tea / Watch it all happen the same way / Watch it all happen slowly.”

this song is melancholic, often sad, but brimming with earthly wisdom. not a surrender; it’s a quiet but total defiance against a common, bitter human impulse to wring out sadness as anger at the natural world around us, to revel in distrust in our discomfort, for a world, just through the skylight, which will always find ways to envelop us.

Florist’s new album, Emily Alone, is out July 26th via Double Double Whammy. Pre-order here.