by David Wilikofsky
I can’t think of any contemporary band that has evolved from record to record as much as Florry. The project has always revolved around lead singer and songwriter Sheridan Frances Medosch, who has helmed the project since she was a teenager. Brown Bunny, the first Florry album, was a charming slab of lo-fi indie rock; its followup, Big Fall, was a far more eclectic effort that incorporated everything from folk and cosmic Americana to disco. Their latest, The Holey Bible, transforms the group’s sound yet again. Reconfiguring the project as a seven piece honky tonk house band, Florry deliver their most cohesive and polished set of music to date.
Perhaps the best place to start is “Big Fall”, the titular track of their previous album. There it was recorded as a rollicking folk tune, Medosch’s understated singing backed by a simple strummed melody. Here it’s transformed into a gently plodding country ballad, the added instrumentation (steel guitar, violin) and backing vocals fully fleshing out the song. Listening to them side by side, the difference is clear: the older version is the work of a solo artist and the new version is the work of a band. In their newest form, Florry draw on a long line of weirdos and auteurs at the fringes of country music for inspiration (think Gram Parsons, The Flatlanders, Steve Earle). Some of more upbeat tunes (“Drunk and High”, “Cowgirl In A Ditch”) are both idiosyncratic and humorous like a Kinky Friedman song; others (“Song For My Art”) are more earnest and heartfelt. They do barn burning alt-country rockers (“Hot Weather”) and mournful ballads (“Big Winter”). They do them all well, and they do them all together.
I want to return to a point I made at the beginning of this review: looking at their catalog as a whole, it’s striking how many sounds Medosch and her rotating cast of collaborators pull off. Perhaps this is just the effect of the project literally growing up with Medosch; my taste certainly changed from high school to college and beyond. Nonetheless, when I think about artists who’ve shown a similar penchant for such radical and successful reinvention, people like David Bowie or Joni Mitchell come to mind. It’s far too early to place Florry in such illustrious company; we’ll only be able to make that kind of judgement when we look back at their career in a decade or two. However, if Florry keep making music on this level, it’s not hard to imagine them joining these legends.