Flowers for Vases/descansos

Largely acoustic with a limited amount of overdubs, Flowers feels somewhat more minimalist than the aesthetically varied Petals -- which isn't to say it's any less impressive. There is a sense that Williams is celebrating her influences.

There are no obvious singles or earworms, but more so than Petals for Armor, FLOWERS for VASES takes a step closer to healing.

While eloquently arranged, Flowers’ uniform anguish makes for an uncomfortable listen, even more so than its sonically daring predecessor, 2020’s Petals For Armor. ... Hopefully, the creation of this album — easily her purest songwriter project so far – also provided some peace.

Seven albums and 16 years into her music career, Williams seems more confident than ever in doing as she pleases instead of pleasing others.

What a pleasure to have a songwriter and singer of this calibre making albums like this, with seemingly limitless texture to dig into and infinite potential meaning for every listener. Just so long as they give it the time.

Heartbreak, anger, acceptance, new love, mental health, and hope converged into something a little more well-rounded. Flowers For Vases, for all its beauty, appears single-minded in comparison, focusing solely on pain-tinged recollection and the challenge of moving forward. But if Williams chooses to spend some extra time wading through the uncomfortable emotions that mark a particular breakup—especially when those feelings make way for more personal growth—then it’s a worthwhile bit of exploration.

This album is the payoff of a risk: while this may not have been a vocally challenging album for Williams, it can be deeply difficult to share the quiet corners of the soul, the stories we might not want to tell but need to for the sake of healing.

In 'FLOWERS for VASES / descansos' Williams belts the stapled vocal range she’s praised for in notable tracks, ‘All I Wanted,’ ‘Feeling Sorry,’ and ‘Ain’t It Fun,’ and completes it with comforting acoustics, simplistic key work and alluring songwriting.

As a quarantine-driven detour on Williams’ artistic path as a solo act, Flowers works as a side project, although its commitment to confessional storytelling and stripped-down production the whole way through will make it appear one-noted against Petals.

“Flowers for Vases/Descansos” has a narrower, quieter palette, though Williams easily handles guitars, keyboards and drums on her own... The songs on “Flowers for Vases/Descansos” are finely polished: every vocal phrase, guitar tone, piano note and studio effect has been thought through by Williams and her engineer and producer, Daniel James.

Whilst the album on a whole is routed in vulnerability – Williams the chanteuse, cathartically pouring whatever remains of herself into her most precious form of expression, “Just A Lover” signifies a shift; a marker of unfinished means, as the pieces she’s surrounded by begin to coagulate into an entirely new feeling.

Flowers puts a lens on her weaker moments without any performative brightness. She simply lets her softer side shine. Gone are the animalistic vocals, replaced with a gentler tone that invokes a towering kindness and grace that pandemic-related solitude has allowed. ... She once again proves there is a fragile beauty that comes with facing the darkest parts of yourself, no matter how painful the process might be.

FLOWERS for VASES / descansos continues what Petals For Armor started in showing just how much of Hayley Williams we still have to get to know as an artist. The Paramore question mark continues to hover, but here Hayley has once again shown that there’s more to her than one band.