Go to a supermarket and there is always something organic available on the shelves. You go to a record shop and you will be lucky, these days, to find anything that hasn’t been processed until all the goodness has been removed yet, somewhere in the mists of today, you will still find an album like “Flower Days” by Samantha Whates & M G Boulter.
“Flower Days” is something of a concept album using flowers, unsurprisingly, to link these eight songs together. Linking the songs together with elegance and artistic aspiration is the special sauce that seasons this album as, while seemingly purveying triviality, Samantha Whates & M G Boulter adopt an almost hippie sensibility to enhance the restrained theatricality that powers their folk flavoured musical confection. And a confection it is, with the sugar sweet voice of Samantha Whates adding delightful degrees of both enchantment and nostalgic perspective into the mix.
“Flower Days” is the kind of album that appears fragile in both execution and conception but it is actually one that has a truly organic spiritual strength that makes it more substantial than you might initially have thought. An album of these times? Probably not. An album of another time and place? Most probably.