-Andrew/Sunfrog, wandering around America catching shows, July 2025
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“Sounds like . . .” is a provocative title, because we scribblers of reviews, we love those points of reference to lure folks in. This band you may have never heard of, they sound like this other band you might have heard of.
The synthy samply crunch clicks that open the album sound like late 90s R.E.M. and like nobody discouraged Florry from opening the album with a 7-minute track. Folks cannot seem to stop mentioning the likes of Dylan, Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones in their impressions. Florry is part of what writer and podcaster Steven Hyden calls the “Wednesday/MJ Lenderman Cinematic Universe” when he is not calling it “the same country rock solar system that includes Wednesday and MJ Lenderman.” Cinematic universe. Solar system. Florry sounds as cosmic as these metaphors.
If it’s a scene or a movement, Asheville’s Drop of Sun recording studio seems to be the common denominator to this shaggy sound, the freaky fulcrum, portal, thin place, and power spot that projects these woozy sonics on the bedroom-wall interstellar-lightshow of our dreams. Yes, this album also sounds like they could be the black sheep cousin that got kicked off the recent Wilco/Waxahatchee double bill for jamming out too long. (That’s just an image that came to me, they were not on that tour, but now that I have said this, I wish that they had been.)
To add to all these references, I hear remnants in this jam-session-not-jam-band sound of the jangly and subterranean at the intersection of the 1980s cowpunk and Paisley Underground and SST scenes. You know, sounds like twangy punk rock, floating above the stage on things even stronger than those THC gummies of today, maybe a heroic dose or several, spiraling and giggling off the sky on acid and shrooms. That last sentence sounds like I feel dangerous, yes dangerous to even write for this sober but still crazy and psychedelic consumer of dangerous sounds. You know, “Sounds like . . . “ sounds like I might tell my sponsor that I don’t need a white chip from just listening to this album, but the sounds are simmering, I am definitely buzzed.
Florry songs are fierce in their intimacy, drifting from sex to death to prayers. Early single “Hey Baby” growls with heartbreak and regret before chug chugging into dorky refrains sing-chanted over bar-rock burning guitars. “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” is a haunting meditation on highway fatalities. In fact, track 8 called “Say Your Prayers Rock” is a revision of “Say Your Prayers” from the band’s 2021 “Big Fall” album. “Dip Myself In Like an Ice Cream Cone” is a sexy summer skinny dipping song, dripping with more innuendo than the plaintive sad song simply called “Sexy,” as “Ice Cream Cone” slips into a slinky squelchy steamy conclusion.
Florry are a band for whom albums are mere captures of the in-person in-real-life thing, only an audio placeholder for fans waiting to tap into their more free-flowing, far-flung, and feral live sound. Mind you, I have not seen Florry live yet, but looking up some live recordings of festival sets in 2023 and 2024, these sets really gave tangible traction to the trippy vibe that has me wanting to start spinning like on the lawn at a Dead show.
Yes, there are at least six people on stage, seven in this press photo. Yes, I hope that their van is spacious enough for them all. Yes, there’s fiddle and pedal steel. Yes, this sounds like the alt-country hippy-punk hoedown that this summer needs.
Florry sound like all the 1970s albums in the discount bin, all the private-pressings that give a contact buzz from just fingering the moldy cardboard, all-wrapped-up in the primitive design of snapshots and scribbles, back when actual ball-point-pen doodles were better than fonts, long before the day of fonts that try to look like ball-point-pen doodles.
But all the bluesy woozy shambolic and shamanic aforementioned antecedents aside, the amazing part is that Francie writes songs and lyrics that actually don’t sound like anything before Francie and Florry existed, being wholly new, even in how old they sound. Florry sounds like they don’t give AF that Francie especially doesn’t sound like anyone else that I can think of, defying even our best hopes to capture what “Sounds Like . . .” sounds like in the flawed format of a record review.
Following the album’s late May 2025 release, Florry are going to spend most of June on the road, hopefully packing-out the smallish venues where they are scheduled throughout the east, south, and midwest, and I sure would love to capture one of their sets, to continue to aspire to and joyfully capture in rapturous prose what Florry sound like. -Andrew/Sunfrog
There are many trails, threads, & backroads that feed my adopted southern identity, but several travel through Georgia. In early 1987, my nineteen-year-old self spent about 8-weeks in an urban intentional community seeking solidarity with our neighbors living on the street. Something about winter in Atlanta changed me.
By then, I was already an R.E.M. freak, & I was still a decade away from my first deep-dive into classic southern literature, which at first meant Faulkner, even though Flannery O’Connor always seems to be falling off the shelf & into my soul, much more recently in the Maya & Ethan Hawke biopic. But if I am transparent about my near-magnetic attraction to the rural south that had me settling down in Tennessee within a decade of that Atlanta stint, it wasn’t short stories & novels, as much as I love them. It was the civil rights movement's history, it was milder winters, it was mountain backroads, & it was outsider folk art like Howard Finster, & it was music like Guadalcanal Diary.
To say I was obsessed back then (& now) with Guadalcanal Diary’s punked-up ecstatic-mystic rendering of “Kumbaya” would be an understatement. They were one of many mid-80s bands that I simply fell for & hard & their version of Kumbaya was always central.
As the Diary’s front-person & primary songwriter, Murray Attaway mentioned in a podcast interview, that Kumbaya was then in-the-mid-80s an obscure campfire jam & not the common parlance pejorative jab that it has become. My response to the cynicism around “Kumbaya” as a concept has been to retort with earnest glee, “but have you tried it, have you really tried singing kumbaya?” Lotta of contempt-before-investigation going around about such an incredible song.
But none of the cheese-&-cringe scout-camp tape-loops that birthed the cynical cliche to wield like a rhetorical baseball bat against “Kumbaya,” none of the purveyors of this miserable recycled trope probably have any idea what kind of primal glory could be obtained by a jangle-punk version of this song, especially when just unapologetically jammed out by some 80s-alternative kids in a sweaty club.
That I could be returning to this “lord I want to be in that number” kind-of-moment some 40 years later is delicious, not nostalgia so much as homecoming & eternal return. I got to see & feel & sing along with the jangle punk Kumbaya in-person, with Murray's old Guadalcanal bandmate Rhett Crowe joining in (Rhett joined the ensemble on "Vista" as well). But I get ahead of myself, as that was the last-song of a two-song encore at the end of the two-date record-release Georgia tour for Murray Attaway’s first solo album in more than 30 years, almost 40 years since the fiery four-album-run of the Guadalcanal Diary canon & fierce touring years.
The already familiar eight songs on “Tense Music Plays” officially dropped on May 9th (get it on Bandcamp or order the physical album, only three singles are streaming). Were it not for my sibling podcaster & music obsessive friend Scott Greenberg telling me about the album on the April edition of the Music Nerds Record Club, I might not have known about it at all. A new Murray Attaway album just wasn’t on my radar, nope, not really at all. But thanks to Scott & advance listening available to radio folks, I was immediately in.
Then relistening addictively to all the old Guadalcanal Diary tracks on repeat for a few weeks & discovering Murray’s early-90s solo album “In Thrall” for the first time (which I somehow missed back then) & then seeking out every remote YouTube interview with Murray over the past decade or so, I was tossed into audio-mystical deep-dive sanctum of revelation & discovery. Insights & inspiration knocked me over.
See, the distinctly southern outsider-poet lyrics coupled with that guitar spangle jangle sparkle tangle is my spiritual musical sweet spot, so much. Both as Guadalcanal Diary & now as Murray Attaway, it’s swelling, hooky, earworms, making meaning & memories. Words & deeply religious sensibilities are simultaneously universal & specific & never dreary & dogmatic. Musically, they are so much a part of my lineage that returns in the 00s with Band of Horse & My Morning Jacket. Lately I have found that sweet spot with the likes of Florry & Fust.
But when I left I-75 to take the backroads through the north Georgia mountains to Athens on steamy Saturday in May, this is the soundtrack of kudzu climbing in clumps of tall trees & church-signs screaming holy ghost declarations. These are the sounds of places like this. I am grateful I sought this night like a desperate pilgrim. I had to shoehorn this amazing experience in-between two already-scheduled events & add lots of miles to my Toyota to make it happen. The Athens set that I caught included most of the new album & a wide selection of Guadalcanal Diary “hits” that had a gaggle of 50-&-60-somethings singing along & dancing like silly children.
While I have become much more the devourer of southern lit today in terms of poetry & novels than I was then, southern rock in all its complications & iterations is much more the mother tongue of what southern gothic & southern cultural identity mean to me. My friend Mark Kemp really developed a redemptive thesis about this & I would include Guadalcanal Diary in the bands that deliver the sounds that help redeem our complicated & conflicted southern souls.
Murray Attaway’s complete catalog is world-building & mood-inducing, always haunted by weird characters but also hopeful & harkening to Georgia as home base. I could scribble for days more about why we need music that is religiously informed & inspired without retching reactionary toxicity, but to find that in what is basically path-blazing southern indie-rock is just incredible.