In 2019,
Emily Sprague released her third
Florist album, the isolated and grieving
Emily Alone, a solo recording that grappled with the unexpected death of her mother and a move cross-country. While the project remained forever quietly intimate in nature, she then rejoined her band on the East Coast for the often-improvisatory group album
Florist. Three years later,
Jellywish is more a singer/songwriter-with-backing-band-type outing that finds her struggling with the time's existential societal dread, stubborn depression, and still grieving -- and singing to -- those lost ("I was only 22 when I lost you/The world is changing/We're getting farther away"). What makes
Jellywish so often profound and not just sad or mindful is a combination of candid simplicity and hints of the supernatural. For instance, after the gentle acoustic-guitar track "Levitate" establishes the state of things with the album-opening lines "Every day I wake, wait for the tragedy/Imbalanced humanity/Should anything be pleasure/When suffering is everywhere?," "Have Heaven" adds layered instrumentation, including earthy drums, indistinct electronics, and occasional effects to a song with lyrics like "Took a long breath in the middle of the town/Found myself in a body" and "Can you hear? I think there's a song singing through the particle fields." Elsewhere, the quasi-title track, "Jellyfish," offers a warm, striding indie folk as a soundtrack to big, sometime bleak questions ("What makes meaningful space?," "Will there still be winter in a year?") with a personal spin ("You are just a small part/But your life is worth a lot"). Bigger-picture songs like this and the swaying "Moon, Sea, Devil" help balance rawer, introspective material such as the delicate "Started to Glow," with its suicidal ideation and anthropomorphized winter scene, and closer "Gloom Designs," a conversation with her mother's spirit during which she admits, "It's not okay, it'll never be okay/Honestly, I'm getting kinda sick of talking about this." For something more playlist-able alongside "Jellyfish," look no further than the spare and sweet "Sparkle Song," a fingerstyle entry that's full of gratitude and affection if not without its fleeting darker thoughts. ~ Marcy Donelson
