About.com Rating

Florrie (a.k.a. Florence Arnold) has been taking the long road to making a big splash. Attempting a grassroots campaign to win over your heart, she’s been sticking to social media to promote herself. Alongside Fred Falke, Florrie’s solo career began with varied and compelling electronic music. Florrie’s method of track distribution, offering her songs on her website for free, along with how she built her presence has made “Florrie” a buzz name for about 2 years now.

In that time, she’s released a few remixes and her debut EP Introduction. This EP would provide her official lead single, “Give Me Your Love,” a song that would feature her percussive side (being a drummer for Xenomania in the past) along with a solid pop production. The Introduction EP would also expose Florrie’s strengths and weaknesses, her ability to easily transition between genres, and her inability to settle on a sound that would define her. It was a brief yet brazen declaration: “This is what I’m capable of.”

2011 brings us Florrie’s second EP, Experiments. And just as her first EP was plainly titled, a direct conveyance of what you’ll find included, the Experiment EP is a collection of tracks seemingly designed for Florrie’s own edification. EPs are a nice, safe way to put out continuously quality music without being forced to create filler tracks to flesh out a full album. This gives Experiments a tight, concise approach to a wildly erratic selection of tracks. If Introduction is Florrie's declaration of existence to the world, then with Experiments, she's declaring to herself.

I'd compare her music to that of Sky Ferreira, another pop/electronica vocalist who is building a slow and steady fanbase for herself with concurrent EP releases. Both ladies are trying to find their voice in this mainstream ruled by Guetta and will.i.am, struggling to keep the synthesizer firmly rooted in reality, and the beats grounded. Perhaps that's why “I Took A Little Something,” the EP's disco/freestyle/pop monster, sounds so good: the electronica is a platform for her lyrics. It doesn't feel like a song was built around a loop and then fleshed out for 4 minutes. The same can clearly be said for “Speed of Light” and “Experimenting with Rugs,” two tracks that dwell in dark sonic caves of pop and soul. And in this aspect, the best blanket statement I can make about Florrie’s new EP is that she sounds vaguely like Ladyhawke by way of Girls Aloud. And compared to artists like Natalia Kills and Neon Hitch, there's an air of integrity to Florrie's music.

Florrie experiments with a variety of grooves

Whether the groove is Latin (“She Always Gets What She Wants”) or the vibe is ponderous and firmly rooted in the softness of early 90s pop music (“What You Doing This For?”), Florrie comes off as genuine. This is a huge step above her contemporaries, in a world where it is every woman for herself. One must take every advantage, and while artists like Robyn have made a name for themselves by persevering and maintaining their individuality, apparently that is not always the course advised. So Florrie finds herself walking that fine line, that tightrope above the circus of the music industry, as casually as one might walk to the local coffee shop. Consider lead single, “Begging Me,” where the production and vocal manipulation definitely nod at techniques used to turn your shower singer into flashes in the pop pan. You can listen to this track, groove to it, get into it, maybe even dance to it at your local dance party... but you won't hear it on the radio. And this is the struggle.

So yes, Experiments is definitely Florrie's declaration to herself. Because in these 6 tracks which have very loose connections to one another, she has continued to find and maintain fans. She is proving her worth to the industry with every off-beat pop number, with every Annie-esque lyric and retro synth, she is proving to herself that no matter what she does, it's awesome.

Released June 2011 on Xenomania.