Florry’s 2023 album, The Holey Bible, was hands down my favorite record of last year. The Pennsylvania based band is fronted Francie Medosch, whose voice resembles that of a great-granddaughter of a very haunted honky-tonk angel sired by a genetic split between Keith Richards and Gram Parsons. Her voice a bray of dirt road dust, raw honey along the bees that produce such wrapped in a patchwork of gingham and flannel. Her words age old tales worth hearing again because she tells them from a TODAY type of cynical clarity and cleverness.
The band are shaggy and bedraggled but in the same pocket with each other, man. A band that sounds like if they could not out drink, smoke and pill pop prime 1970’s Waylors under the table, they gave the most sincere effort trying.
Florry is a flat-out country rock band—but not in the Eagles' "face-deep in a grocery sack of pure flake while speeding down a coastal highway in a Porsche" kind of way, and not in the modern "rockin’’ country sense which brags about kicking up dust in a $70,000 pickup truck while wearing $1,000 Lucchese boots. This is the country rock of middle America. Broke. Heartbroken. Getting through each day’s struggles and self-medicating at night. They're not trying to give the impression they've won a ton of 4H fair blue ribbons but it's possible they were champions at the fair’s Friday night demolition derby. This is a country rock that only small-town outcasts can make—the kind where, if the rent's paid and there's still money left over from the paycheck, life’s looking up. The Salt-of-the-earth type folks that have not gone off the deep end, y’know?
After spending half the summer of 2023 playing the album pretty much every day, to the point of my wife, Jaq, asking if I was mad or something at all the other records I own and me bugging friends near and far that they should make this the next album they listen to (and those who responded having a consensus of YES), I finally got to see them live.
It was early a September afternoon in Raleigh, NC. It’s humid. It’s a Hopscotch Festival day show and the bar is Slim’s Downtown. Slim’s is named such for a reason. It’s a tight and narrow room so it doesn’t take much from it being like an intimate spot check out a band to experiencing something akin to how canned sardines probably feel. Florry seemed to be feeling the same, as they kept adjusting and reconfiguring, trying to fit all seven members onto the small stage. Once situated, they’ve got elbow room for each other at best. The crowd packed into the bar even less. May I remind you that this was a day show at weekend long music festival. And the humidity that North Carolina’s Mother Nature can still kick up into the swamp setting in September.
“This place smells like fish sweating” is the first thing Francie says to the crowd. “She telling no lies” Jaq says to me. Then we all swayed, weeped, staggered, stomped and yearned along with them through their entire set.
Given that there was honestly less than elbow room anywhere in the place, I could not reach into my little bag of camera tricks to shoot with anything else other than what I had in my hand. That was a Lomography Diana F+ loaded with their branded CN 400 film. The whole story of this plastic lensed 120 film “toy camera” goes back 50 years and can be long and convoluted to explain. This article in LensGarden encapsulates it all the best.
The first shot is two consecutive frames of multiple exposures, the second one is an obvious double exposure. The last one happened when I bummed out a few guys in front of me. They’d been hogging the front of the stage the whole set, recording everything with their phones. I just wanted one clean shot, so I stretched my arm out in front of them and snapped it. They gave me that "bogue move, bro" look. No worries, though, phone-filming dudes—the roll of film ended up harsh my high too due to light leaks and slight roached backing paper.
Florry are playing tomorrow night (which may actually be tonight by the time some of you will see this) at Cat’s Cradle Backroom in Carrboro. It’ll be the first time I’ve been able to see them since then. Hell, so stoked I already took the day after off. And, yeah. I’ll have some camera (or two) in hand.