“At least I know that my house won’t burn down to the ground… or maybe it will,” Emily Sprague sings in one of many direct moments on “Holdly”, her five-song debut collection of intimately sprawling folk songs. “If I’ve been in love before, and I’m pretty sure I have/ I’m pretty sure that my house can burn down, down to the ground tomorrow.”
Florist’s Holdly EP — the one that led us to name them A band To Watch . The EP was actually recorded after their upcoming debut, as a stop-gap due to vinyl production delays. That makes The Birds Outside Sang their first full-length statement as a group, and they rise to expectation on its title track, which is more expansive and developed than anything on their previous releases. Everything is still tethered to Emily Sprague’s lithe vocals and weighty lyrics, but the song takes flight around her, each note exhaling with a Porches sense of longing. “Wasn’t the joke on me when I started to bleed?” she asks, building to a calming dissonance before dropping out with an invitation: “Do you and your friends want to come come into the field and watch the fireworks shoot up into the air?” Florist create some fireworks of their own here, but that’s ripped away as all of the oxygen is sucked out of the track at the very end
That interplay between certainty and uncertainty is what makes Florist so heartwarming and wrenching, and it’s something to look forward to on the band’s forthcoming debut, The Birds Outside Sang.
The Fat Angel Sings 