The Felice Brothers: Yonder Is The Clock

I woke up a little confused today, but I got up early all the same, showered and tried to settle down and do some writing. The new A Hawk and a Hacksaw record? No way, at this hour it feels like an anxiety attack. The Black Dice album? Same result.

Thankfully The Felice Brothers were around to stir up some wholesomely unwholesome activity. First of all let me fire off a few backhanded sound byte accolades, the kind that I imagine are currently being aimed at yonder Felice Brothers:

“Fans of Dylan’s Highway 61 era train wreck rumbles meet Calexico halfway at a deserted Midwest bar and soundtrack a crazy punch up.”

“The Felice Brothers dip their flasks in the same upstate New York streams that drove The Band’s waterwheel up at Big Pink.”

“The raw abandon of The Basement Tapes spiced with a dash of Tabasco atmospherics from the Tom Waits recipe book, (volume two).”

“A smoke damaged larynx, a worn out copy of Townes Van Zandt’s Our Mother The Mountain on the backseat with an old stand-up piano and all the time in the world (sic)(the whole thing, sic).”

Yes, it’s Americana With a Twist. Salty enough to expose the full bore indie posers, but not so gnarly that it can’t be played in a shop. Slightly broken down, the best dancer in the barn despite having one arm in a sling. I hate epithets like that, but I could trot out plenty for The Felice Brothers. In the same way they can trot out songs. They can convincingly leap from woebegone dirge (the accordion led ‘Sailor Song’ … Mule Variations anybody?) to the reminisce-why-don’t-you-strums of ‘Katie Dear’ with its group harmony chorus of “Loueeeeeeeeeeeezzzziannna”.

It treads the line between cartoon and authenticity, much like Tom Waits (less the weight of falling piano or two), becoming its own half-breed entity along the way. It’s the kind of record I’d like to hate, but the songwriting is good enough to slip through the gate, albeit as an unwelcome guest. I can’t imagine this getting reviewed in The Wire, but bands like Vetiver (review HERE) and Fire on Fire (review HERE) do. Why? I’ll tell you why Goddamnit! No, nobodies angry here, how could they be? These brothers are good brothers, I just don’t trust the comfort they’re peddling.

The rabble rousing single ‘Run Chicken Run’ does my head in, with lines like “Breathe chicken breathe, don’t you lose your breath. Chickens don’t get no life after death” followed by a hoe down fiddle. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine an English Americana band playing at the climax of a dance at a wedding reception. A well worn cliché that can be shoehorned into a thousand situations without raising the heads of ugly things like thought or awareness. Nothing original here officer….

‘Boy from Lawrence County’ sounds like it could be a cover of a track from Springsteen’s rootsy album from a few years ago. You know! The one with the uber-rousing version of ‘Shenandoah’; a guilty pleasure of mine… Quite a few of them sound like that actually. No wait, let’s re-appraise that one. Like the offspring of ‘Roots’ Springsteen and Ryan Adams. Someone owes someone some money, Jesse James figures somehow. Late period Johnny Cash piano booms some outlaw doom at the right points in the story. ‘Memphis Flu’ goes all lo-fi sing-along on you briefly, before your lug ‘ole returns like a faithful dog to that old Martin acoustic (guessing) once more for the Neil Young’s-warmed-the-seat-for-you chords of ‘Cooperstown’.

I really didn’t expect to get this cynical, I thought it was going to get a kind of good number, like a 6 at least. I’m sorry, it’s impossible not to do this. And God Knows I can get totally sucked into Americana, so something must be missing right? It isn’t just their flash website and their Jack Daniels rubber stamp logo. They’re good at what they do. How’s that?