Florry finds its swagger on ‘Sounds Like…’

The characters populating Sounds Like…, the third album from the freewheeling country-rock band Florry, often come across as if they’re in the earliest stages of figuring out who they are and what they want to do with their lives. 

Witness the narrator on “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone,” who is struck by an awareness that they’ve taken to pulling parts of their being from others (“Took a little part of your life and I made it mine”). Or the tortured character at the center of the epic, album-closing ballad “You Don’t Know,” who carries on oblivious to the ways their pain is hurting those around them. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” singer Francie Medosch offers amid loping drums, heavy sighs of fiddle, and patient guitar, a few beats later pivoting to the brighter future still existent for this person somewhere further down the road. “One of these days, you’re gonna be amazed.”

“I was reading a lot of [Anton] Chekhov, Lorrie Moore, and Alice Munro when I was writing this record, and a lot of their characters are just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, which is funny to me, but also heartbreaking and powerful,” said Medosch, 24, who acknowledged these ideas are also reflective of her current reality, the singer having recently left Philadelphia for the comparative stillness of life in Vermont. “I moved away … to figure out some new perspective for myself. And it’s the same thing with these characters, where they’re trying to find meaning. I mean, everyone is doing that all of the time.”

Other songs take incidents from Medosch’s past and inject them with new layers of meaning, such as the raucous “Truck Flipped Over ’19,” which climaxes in a pileup of fiddle, drums, and fuzzed-out, floorboard rattling riffs, and which has its roots in a horrific car crash the musician witnessed when she took off a week from high school at age 18 in order to travel to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

“And on the way out of town, we saw a truck flip over, and it was almost floating, and we called 911,” said Medosch, who was struck by the memory of the accident when she started writing songs for Sounds Like…, taking the experience and applying it to the need to not avert our eyes from the horrors that surround us in this current social and political moment. “I definitely see the song as representative of the way everyone is looking away from the genocide going on [in Gaza], which is precisely what it has come to mean to us now.”

The Florry bandmates have a tendency to counter the unease, fear, and confusion frequently present in the lyrics with a swaggering brand of country-rock that nods to the classics (influences range from the Rolling Stones and Neil Young to Gram Parsons and beyond) while still sounding wholly its own. “Took a little bit of a song but I made it something else,” Medosch sings in one confessional moment near the onset of “Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone.” Elsewhere, the band piles on battered and fried Southern rock riffs (glorious opener “First It Was a Movie, Then It Was a Book”), pedal steel-kissed slow burners (“Sexy”), and comfortably lived-in turns that hit like ramshackle Rolling Stones B-sides (“Say Your Prayers Rock”).

“I like cool, sexy ass rock music,” said Medosch, who will join her bandmates in concert at Rumba Cafe on Tuesday, June 10. “We’re constantly hyping ourselves up like we’re the best, but in a funny, joking way. We like to say we have a lot of swag, and then we go out there and play like we do. And my bandmates are in the room now, and they’re laughing at me, but it’s true. We listen to a lot of bands that have that swagger, like the Rolling Stones. And when you have that confidence, it has a different effect on the audience. There’s something to it when an audience is aware that the performers know they’re the shit. It’s different than someone being up there all shy and singing quietly. And we’re not like that. We’re gonna be really fucking loud and we’re gonna rock.”

It helped, of course, that Medosch lived in Philadelphia at the time these songs were written, with the musician allowing that the relative chaos of city life naturally bled over into the album, the bulk of which was captured during comparatively relaxed sessions with producer Colin Miller at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, tracked between pickup basketball games and PlayStation sessions of “Resident Evil.” 

The songs Medosch has penned since moving to Vermont have tread a mellower path in comparison, split between lighter, more whimsical solo tunes and a series of stripped-down, progressive country-leaning, full-band tracks that could surface in some form on this tour.

“I’ve been listening to a lot of Terry Allen and Jerry Jeff Walker and trying to hit on some of the simplicity and the genius in those songs, where there’s a little turn of phrase, or where it will be all serious and then they’ll drop something really, really goofy and weird in the middle of it,” Medosch said. “I like to throw a funny little goof into a song, where people are like, ‘Why the fuck did they do that?’ And it’s because we’re not gonna do what you think we’re gonna do.”