Flo Perlin – Characters
Independent – 16 July 2021
Flo Perlin traversed half the globe collecting impressions that would make up her album ‘Characters’, searching for the characters around and within herself. She has busked around the Middle East, USA, Europe, and Asia, following the trail of her Jewish Iraqi family as far as Myanmar, where she was ordained as a Buddhist nun. But the album is the result of standing still and taking stock after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2015 and spending time in and out of hospitals. It’s a cocoon of meditative introspection, enveloping the listeners in Perlin’s honeyed vocals.
The songstress paints the journey into self-reflection in her opening track, Slowly Unfold. She talks of a woman trying to understand herself through creativity, singing: “She had her father’s hand/ She wrote so she could understand”, describing the unfolding that happens when the unconscious takes flight. Perlin’s voice has the quality of running water – it pulls in, submerges, and drowns out everything around it. The sparse arrangement of her gently strummed guitar is supported by a bed of strings, and a violin flies in and out of the song with the ease and bewilderment of freed imagination.
Nothing about Perlin’s songs are extraneous. The singer-songwriter’s vocals breathe freely through the jazzy folk arrangement of Hold Up Your Head Child, with the subtle bassline and the bossa nova-influenced guitar rhythms. The song was written after a flare-up of the autoimmune disease that left Perlin thinking she would have to deal with chronic pain forever. When she recovered, she wrote this song to remind her to “Hold up your head, child/ This will pass”.
Baghdad pulls the listener in with a wistfully nostalgic intro of strings and guitar. “She took a spade/ She’s digging away/ Through the sand with the hope/ That she’ll find a new land”, Perlin sings about her grandmother. Longing colours the song – longing for a home, for roots, for a life left, lived and imagined. The song’s lyricism is equal parts enchanting and heartbreaking when Perlin delves deeper into her family history, describing her grandmother and how “She couldn’t bear/ The taste of mum’s tea/ It runs through the roots of her/ Family tree”.
In Words, Perlin sings: “Scream with your eyes/ but your words can’t get through”, highlighting the imperfection of words and how often they fall short. It’s her most relatable song on the album, where she recognises the flaws that haunt most of us. “Sometimes I listen/ but sometimes I don’t”, she admits, or: “Sometimes I talk/ though I don’t understand”.
Blue Is The Colour is a song about the desire to connect and about the relationships that shape us –with other people, with nature, and with ourselves. Perlin meditates on how to give without having too much taken from you, using the imagery of growing roots to refer both to identity and to our disconnection with nature. “I gave my roots to the people/ but they took them from me”, she sings. The strings support her gentle humming in the end, suddenly propelling the song forward with a melodic hook that tricks the listener into anticipating an instrumental explosion. Instead, the song finishes out softly, leaving the listener aching to hear more.
Perlin’s closing track Move Through The Waves is markedly different from everything else on the album. It’s the only song where Perlin plays the piano, the instrument on which she first started writing music. It’s contemplative, with a laidback, jazzy beat reminiscent of Lianne La Havas. “Simplify the outside,” Perlin repeats like a mantra. With Move Through The Waves, the singer tries to reconcile the different characters within herself, looking inside to simplify the outside. It seems that the song itself is also a musical reconciliation of different musicians within Flo Perlin, showing off her versatility as a songwriter without losing sight of her core. “Let the silence give you space”, Perlin sings throughout the song. When the music stops, the silence suddenly seems bearable, and maybe that’s the gift Perlin has given her listeners – serenity in solitude, lightness in discomfort.
Album Launch: Thursday, August 5th, 2021 at Green Note, London (Tickets)
Pre-Order Characters (out 16 July 2021)