Looks Like... Florry
Twang dipped motor oil, not in musical high fructose corn syrup
Unless this is your first visit here, you probably know my fondness of Florry. A month or so ago, the band announced the follow up to 2023’s The Holey Bible (a top ten album of the year in Clangoring’s rankings) would be coming out in late spring . Titled Sounds Like…, the first track released to the general public to hear was “Hey Baby.” It rings like something off the 2nd Big Star album, is shaggy like the Waylors in ‘73 and brays like Lucinda Williams. Dark humor and heartache orchestrated by a ton of Fender guitars. Yep, sounds like Florry.
The 2nd track they’ve dropped from it, “First it was a movie, then it was a book” is an absolute brewed with mountain water highway jam. Here they are playing it in September of last year at Cat’s Cradle Backroom in Carrboro, NC. It was the last night of many shows in 2024. It was a smaller band on stage than usual. It still ripped. (The photos further down in this article are some of the ones I took that night.)
The album has been out for over a month now, so do some of the other songs on it sound like? “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” takes the wreck on the highway narrative that has been a thing in American music, especially country music, since the advent of big cars, big rigs and long, desolate strips of concrete and gives it a fresh black cloud of tragedy by giving it a slithery din that resembles a doom band raised out in the farmlands. It’s a darkness that also sets a mood on the shambling Neil Ditch Trilogy-ish “Waiting Around To Provide” & “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone.” It also seems to be lurking somewhere in the shadows in the 4H Fair talent show gone all weird feeling on “Big Something.”
In a better world “Say Your Prayers Rock” would be all over country radio if country radio played things actually country rock instead of the the same twenty packaged in commercially processed twang glorified Butt Rock songs each and every hour.
We’re halfway through 2025 and Sounds Like… has already earned its spot in the top 5 of my favorite albums of the year.
These photos were shot on my Practika LTL, which I talked about a little sometime back in the post below.
Posies For My Sweet No.2
The Practika LTL was built in the early to mid 70s in Dresden, East Germany. It is built like a tank. It is also very spartan. The shutter release button takes a little bit of getting used to but it’s ergonomics make sense. The film loading system is a bit of interesting engineering. I’ll refer you to
The film I used is Orwo NC500. Introduced by German film stock maker ORWO (ORiginal WOlfen) in 2022 as one of the first completely brand new color print film by any company in decades (note that ORWO has existed in some form or another since 1910 and this film was produced in the same Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Germany factory where the company started.) It’s a stock that is loved by some and gets the ire up in others. Usually, for the same reasons. How it interprets the color it is capturing, its amount of (sometimes chunky) grain, etc. I’ve shot it a couple of times now and I’m on the pro advocacy side of the fence on it. No, it may not recreate 100% true to color. No, it’s is not grain free. I could just shoot digital if I wanted everything crisp, clear and beyond perfect (and could fix in post anything that isn’t.)
Any type of music, band/artist I’ve ever been into almost always has its blemishes, quirks, off-centerness and happy accidents. Having had to shoot digital for many years for several full time jobs I held down, I came to the decision years ago that DSLRs are machines for work. When I first learned how to take pictures, it was on film. When I learned more about how cameras actually work and all the things that make a photo look like what it does, it was on film. When I went to college to learn even more about those things, it was primarily still all on film. Film is for fun. Film is for me. Film is a hobby of mine. It’s not sterile; it has imperfections. It’s like tape hiss. It’s like spring reverb. It’s like a blown speaker. It is something that runs in tandem with what I enjoy in music feeling wise.
Florry is currently on tour. They’re playing at the Pinhook in Durham, NC tomorrow night (Tuesday, June 24th.) I’ll be there, I just still have to decide on what camera and film I will take with me.