Review: Liana Flores • Flower of the Soul (full bloom)
Liana Flores • Flower of the Soul, debut of the British-Brazilian singer-songwriter: a refined encounter between bossa nova and surprisingly mature sophisti-folk.
Flower of the Soul is a meeting point between British folk, bossa nova and chamber songwriting, a record that transforms the lightness of Brazilian music and the melancholic restraint of English folk into small everyday scenes.
Liana Flores’ debut possesses an immediately recognizable aesthetic: a contemporary folk music crossed by sea breezes, rain-lit kitchens, provincial jazz clubs and a kind of tropical-tinted coastal malinia.
Flower of the Soul makes musical worlds permeable that historically have only brushed against one another. Flores does not use bossa nova as an exotic ornament, nor British folk as a traditional vehicle; rather, she seems interested in the point where English bucolic composure can dissolve into Brazilian harmonic mobility. In this sense, the record does not only look toward Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan — now inevitable reference points — but also toward Astrud Gilberto, Milton Nascimento and even a certain impressionistic strain of French chanson.
The Norfolk countryside evoked throughout interviews — the sea, the trees, the cyclical return of seasons — is not merely an aesthetic backdrop, but a concrete part of the album’s musical construction. Flores herself described Flower of the Soul as a collection of “love songs for the natural world”.
There is also an almost domestic dimension to the Brazilian music present here, something Flores recalls from watching musicians improvise percussion with bottles and cutlery in Rio bars. That idea runs through the arrangements themselves: percussion follows movements that feel more organic than metric, guitars avoid central virtuosity, while horns and strings enter the compositions like sudden shifts of light.
The introduction to “Hello Again” acts as a narrative threshold, its vocal delivery floating with an ethereal quality that recalls passages from Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs.
Noah Georgeson — a producer carrying the long shadow of Joanna Newsom and Bert Jansch — carefully avoids over-polishing the compositions. “Now And Then” moves slowly, as if Flores were observing love from a distance that has already become irreversible. Here bossa nova stops being a simple rhythmic form and instead becomes psychological architecture; the harmonies drift between chamber jazz and Seventies pop melodies, leaving the listener in a state of quiet dispersion.
Even “Butterflies”, featuring Tim Bernardes, avoids any tropical postcard aesthetic. Portuguese does not add exoticism to the record: it silently alters its grammar, dissolving the composure of British folk into something softer and more sensual.
The Full Bloom version further amplifies this sense of an open rather than closed world. Its two additional tracks carry something unresolved in the most beautiful sense of the word.
And in the end, perhaps the most revealing phrase remains the one Flores herself wrote while presenting the album:
“for living’s a strange & wonderful thing”
Artist: Liana Flores
Album: Flower of the Soul 2024 (Verve Records)
Duration: 44'25"
Genre: sophisti-folk, bossa nova
Tracklist: Hello Again, Orange-Coloured Day, Nightvisions, Crystalline, Now and Then, Halfway Heart, When the sun…, I Wish for the Rain, Cuckoo, Butterflies, Slowly, Borrow Mine, Weirdest Shapes.
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