Things I Will Keep #24: FLORALINE

Floraline
Floraline
1999. Minty Fresh

1999 may have been the peak of human life in the western world. At the very least, it was the last year that all of the tools and technology to achieve Utopia were laid out before us and we still felt good about it.

We had the internet, but it hadn’t eaten up most of our brains yet. We didn’t have it in our pocket yet. We weren’t distracted by it in traffic yet. There was no social media to scroll and raise your blood pressure at any time of day yet.

The soul of the internet was still weirdness. Regular people made the rules and corporations were still figuring out what to do with it.

Technology was in the WOW! stage, as opposed to the This is going to take away my job and leave me starving on the streets stage.

Also, the World Trade Center attacks hadn’t happened yet. We had a tragic school shooting in the US (Columbine), but that sort of thing was still an unheard-of crazy anomaly. You could be an adult who lived your whole life without hearing the word pandemic.

Crass sex comedies could still be box office hits. Every neighborhood had a bookstore and a music store and a video store (or two) nearby. New movies from Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch were coming out.

Growing up in the USA in the eighties, our vision for the turn of the century was Armageddon. We had the Cold War mentality. Me, I was also raised on Biblical prophecy (in the eighties, my mother really wanted me to know that the world was going to end soon and I probably wouldn’t live to be 25; thanks, mom). In 1999, the sky was gonna be all purple and people were gonna be running everywhere.

The switch-over to 2000 would not be smooth and half of your loved ones were sure to be trampled by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Then 1999 actually happened and everything was… FINE. No apocalypse. Overall, 1999 was a chilled-out, frozen margarita of a year. Me, I was a young wreck, but my memories of that time are still pleasant. I’d go back for a day and cruise around.

My pick for the music would be the sole release by a group from Atlanta, Georgia called Floraline. It’s a little-known pop gem that’s endured as my own personal, private definitive album for that final, frivolous year of the last century.

The sound of Floraline is a cocktail.

Its appeal is on that level. You sit back and relax with this. The ingredients: new wave synth sparkle, breezy Brazilian rhythms, a splash of disco, hushed vocals, and a profound feel for chill-out sounds. It’s a favorite of mine for night drives and for writing. I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, but I still love when smoke is in the air and that’s what Floraline brings.

If there’s a deeper message in these songs, I have no idea what it is because in twenty years,  I’ve never paid attention to Floraline’s words. They’ve always been merely another texture that works together with the agile basslines and bossa nova guitars.

The exception to this is one song. “Eighty-One”, my favorite. Gates of heaven synthesizers open a track that hits me in the gut every time I hear it. I think it’s the greatest eighties nostalgia song. Part of what makes it great is that it came before eighties nostalgia was much of a thing. It doesn’t resort to cheap references. Rather, it’s about the ache for times gone by and what you left behind there, as well as the fantasy of going back.

I interpret it as yearning for 1981 (“We could always travel/ Higher than the sun/ We could start at zero/ And go back to eighty-one”), but it could also be about any year. Today, it could be about 1999, another world now gone by.

At track 5 on this ten-track disc, “Eighty-One” works as a dreamy centerpiece for an album that maintains its high throughout. Everything that surrounds it keeps up the mood. Twist my arm this week and I’ll cite the elegant thump of “Morningside” and the late night smoke rings of “I Forget” as highlights, but it’s all good in this hood. My second favorite song can be any of the others depending on how the wind blows that day.

Floraline hear a sound that belongs to them and if it’s lightweight, it’s also beautifully arranged and refreshingly free of ego. In the booklet, the band go only by their first names (Linda, Jesse, Darren, Jason, and Abraham) and there are no individual songwriting credits, just “All songs written by Floraline”. Without selling us on any auteur’s vision, Floraline manage to sound like something that naturally emerged–no face, no body, just a vibration–out of moonlight and venerable disco beats.

Floraline are a peak of the Minty Fresh label, who had a knack for finding great indie-pop acts (Papas Fritas, Komeda, The Cardigans) who were soft on the ears without tipping over into twee territory. Minty Fresh were half of the reason why I took a chance on this disc in a used CD shop decades ago. The other half is producer David Trumfio, whose name I knew from likable records by The Handsome Family and The Pulsars.

In most used CD stores, you could examine albums like that. Open up the case. Read the credits. For deep-digging listeners, that’s an important part of making connections and discovering music.

Today, we stream on Spotify, which is fun and offers a deep catalog (including Floraline and every other Minty Fresh band I searched for), but you can’t search by label or credits. Those things aren’t acknowledged there, which is a loss.

1999 did that better.

So here I am getting reflective about an album from 1999 that itself reflects on 1981. I’m thinking about long-closed record stores and an end of the world that didn’t happen. My head’s full of sunny skies and memories of fun nights out.

1999 was a good time, but I can’t defend it with big history book highlights. I can only defend it with silly things. Girls whose names I vaguely remember.  Spontaneous late night trips to the movies. Smoking weed and having long conversations. Listening to music all night. Being young. It’s only fitting that my favorite album from that year should be equally weightless and yet important, too, if only to me.

Current times for me are dystopia. It’s depressing. Optimism about anything feels impossible. I retreat to old things these days.

For some young person though, 2023 is the year that they fall in love for the first time. This is the year that they make their first good friends. This is the year that they have more fun they ever had in their lives and its light will always be there for them, even decades later. This is their 1981 or their 1999.

And some of these kids love music. The vast cyber-world before them takes their attention to weird places and they’ll find their own Floralines. They’ll have their fringe classics that no one talks about, but they’ll talk about them.

Or I hope so, at least. Algorithms don’t keep music alive. People talking about it does.

Here I am, doing my part.