On their recent release From Dreams to Dust, The Felice Brothers commit apostasy by setting themselves apart from the Americana pack (a term I heartily loathe) and bravely join the modern age. Gone are washboard and fiddle; James Felice’s accordion stays mostly in the background. The band no longer records in a converted chicken coop in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, and singer/songwriter/frontman Felice is no longer looking over his shoulder at fellow Catskill legends The Band.
On Dreams to Dust he commits that greatest of Americana sins–he says to hell with the Dust Bowl and sings about Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Friedrich Hegel instead. Why, he even tosses in Jean-Claude Van Damme and AC/DC baseball caps.
The increasing sophistication of Felice’s subject matter corresponds to the band’s more contemporary sound, and will no doubt alienate purists who love the band for old-timey tunes like “Run Chicken Run” and “Frankie’s Gun.” Some of their new songs are streamlined and bottom heavy, and you won’t hear then being played on a honky tonk jukebox or your local folk festival. I can practically hear the same people who booed Bob Dylan at Newport screaming “Sell outs!”
LP opener “Jazz on the Autobahn” is the most blatant offender. A tale of the Apocalypse framed in a story about a sheriff on the run with a woman named Helen, the music owes no debt to Pete Seeger and his mighty axe. And Felice (the best poet working in music today) paints a vivid picture. “This is what the apocalypse will look like,” sings Helen, “a tornado with human eyes” marked by “a sundown of the human heart.” She tells the sheriff it:
“Won’t look like those old frescoes, man, I don’t think so
There will be no angels with swords, man, I don’t think so
No jubilant beings in the sky above, man, I don’t think so
And it won’t look like those old movies neither
There will be no drag racing through the bombed-out streets neither.”
And all the while the sheriff’s asking himself, “What is freedom?” “Is it to be empty of desire? Is it to find everything I’ve lost or have been in search of? Or is it to return to the things to which there is no more returning?”
“Money Talks” isn’t hillbilly music either. It opens as an interview conducted by a disembodied voice, who asks Felice absurdist questions like “How many golfers do you think have perished among these dunes?” and “Do you believe that urinals can be portals to another universe?” The song then segues yet another reference to the End Times: “Tick tock goes the doomsday clock/Hysterics in the bridal shop.”
“Be at Rest” is Felice’s elegy to himself, and just as with “Money Talks” things grow increasingly strange: amongst other things Felice has a fear of falling pianos, and once spent two months stuck in a painting by Brueghel.” (The elder, he adds in an afterthought). The “Like a Rolling Stone” organ on “Celebrity “ lends it a Dylanesque feel, and has Felice laying out the lurid goings on of every anonymous celebrity of the alphabet. “Land of Yesterdays” is anything but folksy, what with its introductory soundscape, although the gospel ending, on which Felice repeats the line “You can never return,” gives the song a touch of the eternal divine.
The remaining tracks on From Dreams to Dust are classic Felice Brothers; the music may be timeless, but the cultural references aren’t. “Blow Him Apart” is directed towards a woman who breaks a boy’s heart. Following some great lines (“I mix more medications/Than mixed martial arts fans live in basements”), Felice gets down to the nitty gritty: “But I watched you/Blow him apart/Like a meteor/They’ll find pieces of that boy’s heart/When they get to Mars.”
Elegiac and mournful closer “We Shall Live Again” is an apocalyptic companion piece to “Jazz on the Autobahn,” and without a doubt the only song about our final days that includes a reference to AC/DC merch. In the song we’re all riding a train “up into the chasms of the sky,” leaving behind a life where “any joyful thing/Is paid two-fold in suffering.”
“Valium” definitely hails from the sad and slow C&W tradition and has Felice singing “My happiness is touch and go/Kinda like this motel’s HBO.” Later, in a celluloid reverie, he adds “I must have been lost on some kind of excursion up to Colorado/I think her name was Marilyn/But I remember nothing else about her/Except that hair smelled like gunpowder.”
“Inferno” is a personal favorite—it’s all bittersweet memory of youth as seen through the prism of popular culture: “Fight Club was sold out/We went to see Inferno instead/You said, “I never even heard of it/But I liked Karate Kid.” But the song takes a haunting turn into the fog of loss that can only be viewed on the silver screen of the human heart: “Who’s that singing in the land of the falling rain,” sings Felice, “I think it’s Kurt Cobain.”
On “To-Do List” Felice tosses out a disjointed array of things that need to be done: “Become a lot more happy/Build a maze of Styrofoam/Befriend an unfortunate lunatic/Wail on a saxophone,” while on the doleful “All the Way Down” he waxes mystical: “If you can die/It will be alright/There’s nothing but starlight/The whole way down.”
Finally, there’s “Silverfish,” on which Felice, accompanied by piano, brother James’ accordion, and some female backing vocalists throws out seemingly random lines about the fauna in his life before repeating the cryptic words, “I’ve got to do something/I know what it is” and closing with the lines “I know what it is/And it’s killing me.”
The rock scribe Greil Marcus wrote of the old, weird America; The Felice Brothers have as their subject the new, weird America. Ian Felice has one foot in the past of “Cumberland Gap” and another on the pedal of a Triumph 73; his subject matter takes us from the Rook of Revelations to Mad Max.
But the true root of his genius is the ability to evoke sorrow; he may occasionally leaven it with irony and self-deprecating comedy, but the sadness is as real but intangible as the ghost of Kurt Cobain lost in the rain. Like the sheriff in “Jazz on the Autobahn” we’re left to mourn those things we’ve lost and have searched for. And like him all that’s left to us is the desire to return to the things to which there is no more returning. We’re all in the rain with Kurt Cobain, and the skies will never clear.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
