The Felice Brothers

Both streams of my lineage flow from the water of the Hudson River Valley. I mention this because it’s taken me a while to figure out the deep connection that I feel with the music and songs of The Felice Brothers — a connection that’s gotten me crazy, daring to make ridiculous claims about how this band is the greatest thing to happen to American music since the watershed of the Mississippi overflowed into the foothills of Appalachia. But all that talk is crazy-talk…or at least that’s what I try to keep telling myself.

In their follow-up to 2008’s self-titled The Felice Brothers on Team Love Records, The Felice Brothers bent the corner of yet another page of the American music history book with Yonder Is The Clock on April 7^th.

I’ve heard tale of the days when the lines that mark out the major regions of this great country could be drawn along the outer edges of the sounds made by the people who lived there — when a blind man could tell he was standing in the bayou or west of the Great Lakes or in the hill country of Central Texas by the music being played. When music had geography.

The Felice Brothers are steeped up to their chins in traditions and vibrations that have been distilling in the American experience for well over a century. There’s blood in this music. From the slow, whispered introduction of “The Big Surprise,” I can’t really do much justice in trying to explicate on this page what it means for this generation to have this sound emanating from one of their own. The bass drum starts, the snare barks, the bass begins, the violin starts to motion from somewhere off in the distance, calling soft, then louder, louder still to the ears of today to “Get the boys/Turn on the show…” till finally, in a fit, it screams. The crescendo collapses and rebuilds itself.

Welcome to the apocalypse of Yonder Is The Clock. What follows is a tale of death, a celebration of love lost and rekindled, bruised and beaten tragic heroes, the shameless hussies who love them, Penn Station, God, Jesus Christ, the Devil Engineer, and “the Star of Bethlehem.”

This is America The Beautiful. Simone, Ian, and James Felice, along with Christmas and Greg Farley, are the traveling minstrels who packed themselves into a “short” school bus, accepted pennies in their hats playing in the subway, and took to the road to go out and find her. Then they took scraps of wood, built a chicken coop large enough to hold their instruments, and under that roof they tell us just how beautiful, how good she is, and also how much of a free-wheelin’ cheater she is.

Every album from The Felice Brothers is a recording of the most tragically romantic American love affair since that kid from Duluth high-tailed it to New York City, and this new Yonder Is The Clock is no exception.

The most well-known track, “Penn Station,” follows the opener and picks up the pace of a man’s last breaths on the dirty tile floors of the famous train station on 8^th and 31^st. (I’m only assuming the tale is based on the sad fate of Louis I. Kahn, but I’ll not make any sure projections regarding that here and now.) The song hops off the dying breaths of the accordion push-and-pull as two trains off in the distance come rattling down the tracks -– one to take the dead man to heaven being outran by “the Devil Engineer” in the other.

Death then takes to piano in “Buried in Ice,” a sincere warning crooned from Ian’s hoarse heart that “Professor, what kind of miracle is this?/You better be careful just what you wish/For it comes at such a price”…and the barroom piano stroll chills the verse.

If we’re gonna die anyhow, I suppose we should have a good time doing it, and I’d gather The Felice Brothers would have to agree. Judging by the tempo of “Chicken Wire,” a kick-the-dust-up-off-the-floor number recounting the tale of a man on his dying bed, I know our eye-to-eye on that particular matter to be the gospel truth. The organ told me so…and no one can tell a lie to the hum of an organ.

There is a genius in Yonder Is The Clock. Aside from the great musicianship, the brilliant storytelling, and the arrangements, the genius is touching that fine line between the dissonance that tortures this existence and the perfect harmonies that make it so beautiful. But The Felice Brothers are certainly pulling off this sort of genius in a very poignant way at this day and time. To be able to make music that provides a soundtrack to that horribly fucked up overlap between suffering and redemption at a time when the market reeks of sugar-pop, high-glucose, oversaturated filth — when the whole world is creaking on it’s hinges — is nothing short of prophetic.

Yes, Yonder Is The Clock is of the brand of album that I’d dare to claim “prophetic” (as far as I’m at liberty to do so). “When We Were Young,” for instance, is laden with cryptic references to 9/11 and the loss of innocence — that disjointed sense of a massive turning point in one’s existence… “So where’d those planes comes from/That burned my city up/All that smoke and ash/Teaching us how to crash”…a teenager, a twenty-something, you, me, America wondering what happened to life on September 10^th…where did it go?

This is why there’s something different about The Felice Brothers. How does a band reach so far into the past, put its feet down in the present, and reach its hands so far into the future? How, and why now of all times?

I can’t start to tell you, but these kids from Catskills are certainly offering my generation something we need so badly: a voice…but not any voice — a voice that echoes true to the voices that came before it and speaks boldly to the voices who are surely promised to follow.

There are the obvious critics who will disclaim that The Felice Brothers are mere novelties of that Duluth boy or even a band who put together a canon in Woodstock, but I’m gonna have to argue that these critics have fallen victim to their own near-sightedness. This is the music of America, sliced and stitched and scarred by the interwoven stories of the American people — the Democracy. There’s blood in this music. From the British barber who’s “razor’s sharp as hell” to the “Boy From Lawrence County” to the “white-walled church” of “Cooperstown,” The Felice Brothers are giving us literature — Whitman’s literati – set to the accordion’s sigh, a banging guitar, a set of drums, the bass and fiddle, and yes, the washboard.

God bless the land from which this band sprung forth.