On their most recent album, Florry call for lucid and optimistic relaxation.
Florry is a project led by Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter Francie Medosh. After years of wandering through various creative iterations, she experienced a kind of epiphany in the confinement of the pandemic, revealing to her the subject of her next songs: the intense abandonment of hope and release.
In a very nasal voice, she recounts dreams, road stories, explores her relationship to her life as an artist and reminisces about the seasons, past time, past loves… all with a wry smile.
The Holey Bible evokes that kind of well-deserved fatigue after a long, good day. A satisfying tiredness, a mature and complicated tiredness that makes us proud to have reached the point where it’s accessible to us. A tiredness that, in a way, is invigorating… This feeling of mature nostalgia permeates all eleven songs, from the rockiest to the most wandering, and does so so strongly that it ultimately gives the impression of feeling the twilight not of one day, but of hundreds of days simultaneously. Quite a relief.
The musicality of the project is also worth mentioning. First of all, it’s very well done. The sound palette is filled with the essentials: guitars, pedal steel, fiddles, tambourines. Definitely country. Above all, one might think, with a detached ear, that the whole thing is very traditional. But if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that every song has a little something unclassifiable, something that makes you raise your eyebrows or frown. Whether it’s a rhythmic, melodic or vocal detail, an extra beat on the bar, an extra chord in the progression, an unexpected harmony, a bleating voice, etc., such little surprises pique the listener’s interest. Little surprises like these pique the attention, adding to the effect of spontaneity, nonchalance and candor that are already the album’s great strengths. It’s as if skilled musicians had been asked to play the child who was asked to compose a country song from memory, eleven times rather than once.
After all, the spirit of youth is alive and well. Some of these songs were written by a 19-year-old Medosh. Here was someone who, in the face of contemporary despair and the dizziness of the years ahead, turned to the radiant glow of the sun, to the smiles and cries of her friends, and captured the energy.
