Characters

Flo Perlin may cite diverse musical influences, given her extensive world travel and her Iraqi and Belarusian heritage, but in Characters, the singer-songwriter’s second album, the music is cool and restrained to a Western classical sensibility that occasionally settles at the jazz café grand piano. Her vocals, giving way to a gentle vibrato, remain understated and leave much pause for cogitation, as her songs tell deeply personal stories of, for example, family heritage, adjusting to life with chronic pain, and personal development.

Album opener, ‘Slowly Unfold’, sets the tone with finger-picked guitar and string swells, no doubt influenced by her own cello playing and stints in orchestras, which continues into second track, ‘Back in Time’. The following song, ‘Hold Up Your Head Child’, takes a similar approach to instrumentation but the addition of snappy percussion alters the entire effect: delivery becomes more akin to a jazz standard, suiting the content in which Perlin reflects on her new-found suffering. By the fourth track, ‘Baghdad’, the centre point of the album, Perlin has found her feet and the song soars with an earworm of a refrain. Musically Characters may only very lightly draw on global folk influences, but the storytelling is something that will inevitably appeal to listeners of all persuasions.