This next Mog review is for the wonderful new record from The Felice Brothers, a real life group of brothers that traverse the country, live and record in an old school bus.

Originally appeared on Mog's main page and on the following post:

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/146207

he Felice Brothers

The Felice Brothers

When you first hear an artist, the first dozen or so times you spin the record, or hit that big pillow of a play button in I-Tunes, or press the metallic gun metal grey button on your old cassette boom box, and you hear the gears engage, the tape sliding across that little tab of felt, the first few notes for a new band are always crucial. All the piles and gigabytes of music that sit un-listened to, if there’s one wrong note, it’s judged once and then tossed aside.

So this first time that I listened to the Felice Brothers’ second album, Tonight at the Arizona, it was through thirty-second sound samples where I tried to figure out what the rest of the record sounded like. The record cover had all five of them, but I only heard one, and my brain had to piece together what else might come up after the thirty seconds ended. What sort of burst of notes clustered together as melody might rise to the surface like some sort of bruise?

And what came out to me, almost instantly, was Bob Dylan.

Not the imitation Bob Dylan, not an actor in that Todd Haynes film, but someone going to that area around upstate NY, or the Catskills, someone very close to him just before the motorcycle crash, the time before John Wesley Harding and New Morning, his voice bringing the spirit of The Band and Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and The Pogues, all of this murky water turned up for me in bite sized thirty second clips.

And while some of the songs crept up in my dreams, it took seeing them live to really bring home that it was a family at work.

I had this on my mind when I walked into the Roseland Theater here in Portland the other night, and was surprised at not seeing one guy on stage, but five. The first one I noticed was the drummer, who introduced the band the way an older brother would, with a bit of a mocking tone, and ready to fight if needed. He introduced the singer who didn’t look like Dylan, didn’t have that harmonica welded onto his chest. The singer looked like he was about twelve and one of those runaway scamps from the Beat Generation. There was another brother who played a Hammond organ, well not a real Hammond organ, but a modern keyboard set to the setting of a Hammond organ.

They are all in their early twenties, these guys, all of them real-life brothers, and they remind me of the kind of guys that hung out in the photo lab at my university until long after dark, smelling of incense and the funny fixer or developer fluid that sticks to your skin for hours afterwards.

The more the songs sat with me, the more I realized that this was the music of hobos, street people, transients, vagrants, the big bally-hooed travelers on the back of a pick up criss-crossing the country with Keruoac narrating. With their lungs dipped in whiskey, the brothers brought the house down in my mind as together arm in arm, they swung around the loose work of the Pogues ala If I Should fall from Grace with God. And the whole time that Hammond organ going, creating a spine around the music.

For the songs on The Felice Brothers are brave songs, with wide brush strokes, wide in the mind because they hold the kernels of the American Revolution, from the Carpetbaggers and Beats to the Anarchists. Because in their voices are the voices of artists and poets and they know that by singing these songs in this register they are digging up the tenth grade literary canon. From Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to the lazy way Walt Whitman smoked a cigarette on the last day of Spring, they capture that new found wonder and enlightenment. It made me think of the teenage kicks of Jack and Neal Cassidy burning down the road, of Dean Moriarity’s bandages coming loose and stained with dirt and nicotine and the never ending ribbon of road and that bulge of raw land.

A band that’s willing to create splashes of song, pocketed in between rousing choruses of death and eternity and when they do break out into song on stage as they do on this, their third album, they sound like five people standing in a dark alley, dancing and drinking, on a hot afternoon, and pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood is singing along, and the melody gets loud and strong, and the bleeding gums of Dixieland comes up, and it all happens so succinctly, and none of it is overdone.

Because on this self-entitled album we get a taste of all their styles, the vaudevillian melodies, the stories of dead junkies, old flophouses, heroin reference dropped in as casually as the sound of empty whiskey bottles hitting the floor. Each of them have their own style, one bringing in the W.C. Fields charismatic drunk act, another brother, the one who sings on “Don’t Wake the Scarecrow,” plays it straight, offering up a doomed street romance cut short by heroin.

For this is a record to live in, to try on, inhabit like the walls of an old house, and there’s always that one hallway that’s empty for most of the afternoon, but come night there is a party, and we bear witness to the enormity of it, and later there’ll be one person left, sitting on the front steps listening to the silence and tasting all that forgotten perfume.

“The Murder of Mistletoe” relies just as much on negative space, the sound of a piano in an empty hall, or maybe a street corner, this is music that takes time to fully reach you, as you have to row out to it, and each time you visit you hear something else bubble up to the surface.

They are all singers, and at least two of them are songwriters, and whenever one of them sings, I think it’s the drummer singer, I swear, he pronounces words the same as Dylan, the way Dylan pronounced War in “Masters of War,” letting out the raw “aw” sound and catching back in the throat like a boomerang, and in so doing, uncovers the journeys Guthrie and Dylan did, passing the torch from one to another, walking together at dusk in the Catskills on a railroad track.

“Love Me Tenderly” has the echo back draft of jazz filtered through Dylan, Miles, and Monk, until we can see thirty years of the musical notation blur under the influence of their pond.

By the end of the record, we are introduced to all of the brothers, so it all feels like one big introduction. For on The Felice Brothers, they all sit down on the rails, take their shoes off, and fall into the School Bus they live in, travel in and record in. There’s a picture I’ve seen of the younger brother singing into the microphone on a stand in the bus, their recording studio and their home. It’s covered in graffiti and never swept.

I can imagine that outside of the picture’s frame, there’s probably old Olympia pop tops in there, wind up clocks, and cigarette butts, old suits, and we can hear the one inch reel to reel tape flapping when the song finishes.

And that last song probably sounds like Tom Waits having more whiskey with Shane McGowan, and overhead Dylan is in the night sky, looking down on the proceedings sent from whatever abandoned old baseball stadium he plays in on his never ending tour.

And the brothers Felice are tired after listening to the playback, and they finish the last of the mulligan stew, put out the fire, climb back into the van, sleep close to the guitars and wash boards. And when the record’s done they hope the people that will listen to it will feel the way they do now, that underneath the stars in some nowhere town in the American Southwest, a long way away from home and all of it’s twisted Americana, is the sound of a family making music.

“Radio Songs” sounds like that, an epitaph that brings in Zydeco influences on this barnstorming sing along that acts as a mediation on the power of family and loved ones, albeit one enjoyed in a I-hope-tonight-never-ends-sort-of-way.
“Please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, moved me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life, all my radio songs, radio songs, radio songs.”

And after that who wouldn’t want to turn around and watch it all unfold all over again from track one? Like the best moments in life, the songs on The Felice Brothers are like fourteen different snapshots of time in a person’s life, sometimes it’s you and sometimes it's not, but it’s always sad and beautiful and mischievous and alive.