Liana Flores :: Flower of the Soul

Flower of the soul is a meeting point of British folk, bossa nova and chamber songwriting — a record that turns the lightness of Brazilian music and the melancholic restraint of English folk into small everyday scenes.

“Meeting point” turns out to be too simple a frame for the record. Liana Flores is British-Brazilian: raised in South Norfolk, with a Brazilian family behind her. British folk and Brazilian music arrive already entangled in that inheritance, divided more by critical vocabulary than by Flores herself. Flower of the soul comes from a voice formed on both sides at once. This is why the supposed fusion feels so unforced: Norfolk and Rio require no introduction to one another, and neither has been brought in to provide the exotic element.

Her debut has an immediately recognisable aesthetic — a contemporary folk crossed by sea breeze, rain-lit kitchens, provincial jazz clubs and a coastal melancholy with a tropical tint. The reference points are inevitable, and she earns them: Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan on one side; João Gilberto, Nara Leão and Milton Nascimento on the other; a certain impressionistic strain of French chanson threaded between. What she is really after is the seam where English bucolic composure dissolves into Brazilian harmonic mobility — the exact place the two halves of her touch.

The Norfolk she describes in interviews — the sea, the trees, the cyclical return of the seasons — is not backdrop but material; Flores has called the album a set of "love songs for the natural world." The Brazilian side arrives just as domestically, out of a memory of musicians in Rio bars improvising percussion on bottles and cutlery. That looseness runs through the arrangements: the percussion moves more organically than metrically, the guitars refuse central virtuosity, and horns and strings enter like sudden shifts of light. And it matters whose hands they are in — the record was made with the producer Noah Georgeson, of the Joanna Newsom and Bert Jansch worlds, and includes the Brazilian cellist and arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, the man who has worked with Jobim and Sakamoto. The pedigree on both sides is real.

Nothing here is costume.

"Hello again" opens like a narrative threshold, the vocal floating with an ethereal quality that recalls Linda Perhacs'sParallelograms. "Now and then" moves slowly, as though Flores were watching love from a distance that has already become irreversible; here bossa nova stops being a rhythmic form and becomes psychological architecture, the harmonies drifting between chamber jazz and Seventies pop. And on "Butterflies", with Tim Bernardes, Portuguese does the album's subtlest work: it adds no exoticism, it alters the grammar, loosening the composure of English folk into something softer and more sensual — the clearest proof that the two languages here are not guest and host but equals.

The Full Bloom edition widens the frame rather than closing it; its extra songs stay open, unresolved in the best sense. And the line that gives the whole record away is one Flores wrote herself, presenting it: "for living's a strange & wonderful thing."