Concerts are a great “third place,” the name for events that take us away from the first two places of work and home. They give people an outlet and a spot to share common interests with complete strangers. However, the more concerts attended, the more the third place can become commonplace. For an infrequent live music attendee, each concert is more likely to hold a special place and a big part of it are the number of concerts you attend.

Some nights, I go to a concert and I go home and find people online who shot videos so I can watch and take myself back. There are also some nights where I try to beat the traffic at the end of the show. Two years ago, on a Monday night at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, Ohio, alt-country band Florry left a lasting imprint on my brain and it started with a dog.

The concert, added late to the end of Florry’s tour that headed east, back towards their Philadelphia home, started with an announcement. Someone abandoned a dog outside of the venue. Maybe it was because in a group of people there is bound to be someone who is more responsible than you are and will properly care for the animal.

Attendance that night was not particularly high, with somewhere in the mid-30s for tickets sold, which the worker at the door kindly shared. Most of those people were there for local openers Lake Philly, made clear by most people in the crowd wearing Lake Philly shirts and an awkward moment when the band basically pleaded for their friends and fans to stay for Florry.

Their pleads were for good reason. Florry entered my brain before their 2023 Holey Bible release. After a couple listens of their previous Big Fall release, I preordered Holey Bible and obsessed over the music. It’s part classic rock guitar riffs, part country accompaniment of a fiddle and steel pedal, and honestly the epitome of fun.

Florry members all wore hats, and one bonnet, that night to celebrate their last show of the tour, and lead singer/harmonica player/guitar player Francie Medosch even adopted anyone in the crowd with a hat on as part of the band. As a newly minted member of a band that was worth the price of admission and then some, I was taken aback at how their music came to life when heard live.

That was two years ago. The dog found a home and so did Florry in my regular music rotation. So, when the band announced their tour for Sounds Like…, their 2025 LP release, and Columbus was an early stop, I may have been the first person to buy tickets.

Just when I thought Holey Bible was as good as it got, Sounds Like… brought that same fun I felt watching Florry play live into physical media. Engineered by MJ Lenderman drummer and Wednesday-adjacent musician/producer Colin Miller, the album pops through your headphones like I thought Holey Bible did two years ago. It comes alive like Florry did at Rumba Café.

This time in front of close to 100 people, still a desperately low attended concert for the quality of music presented, Florry, along with Lily Seabird and Columbus’ own Spitcurl, gave another performance that reinforced everything I thought of the headliner.

Up first was Spitcurl, a four-person band out of the capital city who played nearly 40 minutes to kick off the night. In those 40 minutes, Spitcurl did not take much time to talk between song. If anything, the band instead fused their work together, and there is nothing wrong with that at all because Spitcurl can play.

Anytime a band steps onto stage with a six-string bass, they are going to know how to play. The group played tracks from their 2025 self-titled debut, through lead singer and guitarist Morgan Webb. Her soft singing fit the vibes of the songs, but the music was the focal point, fitting the alt-country theme of Florry and Lily Seabird.

Spitcurl was closer to a jam band feel, and that is a compliment. The music had personality and thankfully they had tapes on hand to sell to get some money from their hard work.

Lily Seabird was the traveling support, and then some. Similar to the music that came out of Haw Creek from Wednesday, MJ Lenderman and Miller, Seabird lives in a shared community in Burlington, Vermont. The home is affectionately called trash mountain, since its built on one. Living with Seabird is Florry’s Medosch, who moved there from Philadelphia, and Florry pedal steel player John Murray.

On this tour, two members of Florry joined Seabird’s traveling band for her set, including Murray who played drums. Seabird went through her new 2025 LP Trash Mountain, and played all but one song, in order of the album. It ended with “Bug” from her 2021 LP Beside Myself. Trash Mountain is about Seabird’s life living at the home and in the community.

Seabird is a singer-songwriter that plays the traditional singer-led tracks like Trash Mountain, plus country and indie rock. There is not a specific genre to put on Seabird’s work. The singer’s voice is a combination of innocence and gravel. It’s like you feel the singing more than merely listening to it. Especially the latter parts of the album. “How Far Away” is the perfect pendulum swing to the more emotion-ripping part of the album, a track with keyboard and Seabird’s vocals alone. Two tracks later is “Albany,” my favorite of the night and the album.

“The sun was set and our time would surely end
And by thе summer’s end
Well I had lost my bеst friend
Well you just couldn’t be there and
I guess things weren’t meant to be
And it all would surely end
Just like it did that summer’s eve”

During Seabird and Spitcurl’s sets, Florry band members stood in the front of the crowd and took in the music themselves. They are not a band that hides backstage before and after a show. So, it came as no surprise that when Florry got on stage, they told everyone to move up against the stage after a timider crowd gave the performers their space during the first two performances of the night.

With the crowd practically now on stage, thanks to the coziness of Rumba Café, they were close enough to be blown away by what Florry sent out of their instruments.

They began with “Pretty Eyes Lorraine,” which is a track that highlighted Medosch’s vocal work more than the driving guitar solos and edge than some other tracks. It was a false sense of chill that Florry followed up with “Hot Weather,” which is a track with vibes taken directly out of 60s classic rock that needs played in the summer, on the highway, with the windows down. It was the first of many pairings Florry built into their set throughout the night.

When I was in high school, I watched old videos of Jimi Hendrix and how the instrument was more or less an extension of his body. Medosch is the same way with the telecaster. It’s less Medosch playing the instrument as the two are working together.

It isn’t only Medosch, with the pedal steel guitar often ending up leaning over on two legs and the bow hairs ripping off as they catch the strings on the fiddle on “Truck Flipped Over ’19.” That song especially, which Medosch credits Miller’s work on the album as a reason she was able to get the story of a truck crash out into a song, was when the band was at its full force.

On recording, it’s just shy of four minutes, but live it roared for what felt like at least 10 minutes. It included breakdowns, Medosch’s pipe belting scream and lyrics painting a picture of a horrible, chaotic, scene.

“Like a miracle of life I watched that truck take flight
And it took flight, levitated across the median to the right
I knew from my dread
That driver was dead
Cos the truck crashed down on its left side where the driver sat”

“Truck Flipped Over ‘19” explores the trauma of the moment alongside music that switches up enough to be an ADHD-diagnosed listener’s dream. Each time it jumps from mild to wild, there is not a slow build-up. It’s a crash.

I do not play guitar but watching Florry play makes me want to buy a guitar and make the worst sounds imaginable. That is the kind of fun the band exudes even when they are telling difficult stories.

Florry also played a couple new, unreleased songs called “California” and “2 Beers.” You can tell that the band genuinely loves creating music. They did not play them because they are releasing the songs or to tease a new album. Its music created for the sake of playing the music. The same thing happened two years ago when I heard “First it was a movie, then it was a book” for the first time. It did not make its way onto a physical piece of media for two years.

The band closed up shop with their second of two covers they played. Earlier in the night it was Terry Allen’s “My Amigo” and it ended with Ron Wood’s “Mystifies Me.” Florry played 13 songs in about an hour. Mixed in was the unboxing of a new, and blue, tambourine, stories of how some of the songs came to be and the normal banter you would expect from a show where if you stretch an arm out, you’re liable to accidentally hit a musician.

Overall, Florry does not give off any feeling that they are trying to fill arenas. While bands like the aforementioned Wednesday and MJ Lenderman are selling out larger and larger venues, with close to the same feeling as Florry, the Philadelphia by the way of Vermont rock band has all the talent and showmanship to be doing the exact same thing.

Go see Florry whenever you can. Florry is for you if you like loud guitars, emotion and you are someone who can take care of their own dog.