Felice Brothers – Yonder Is The Clock

No discussion of Bob Dylan’s seminal sessions with The Band—known to any and all rock connoisseurs as The Basement Tapes—can ever go by without invoking Marcus Greil’s phrase “the old, weird Americana,” and that’s probably for good reason: No rock and roller before or since has conjured all the old spirits of American mythology, the surreal humor and cheerful tall tales of old country and blues and folk songs, as vividly as Dylan. Indeed, Dylan’s invocation of the old, weird Americana on The Basement Tapes is downright extraordinary; the invocation of Dylan’s invocation, significantly less so. Still, when it’s done well, it can still be pretty sublime—and there aren’t many who do it as well as The Felice Brothers.

The Felices themselves actually seem like characters from an old mountain folk song: As best I can piece together their biography, they started out playing in the New York subway, and also spent at least part of their time living together in a solitary cabin somewhere in upstate New York. They wandered out of the forest last year with a self-titled label debut (following a couple of indie releases), made up of songs so rich in timeless black humor and geography and inspired weirdness, they sounded like they’d been around forever—or at least since the Great Depression. And if that album channeled Depression-era country-blues idioms through a heavy Dylan filter, their new one, Yonder is the Clock, is an uncanny homage to those seminal Dylan/Band sessions down in the basement of Big Pink—and not just because of Ian Felice’s decidedly nasally, raspy tone.

No, the connections run deeper than that, down into the very songs themselves. The Felices write songs that mix Dylan’s surrealism with an apocalyptic streak a mile wide, and a set of characters and settings that seem to have leapt out of the back pages of the weirdest, wildest American lore. They excel at stirring up raucous, basement sing-alongs—as on the dusty folk boogaloo of “Penn Station”—but they’re equally adept at sinister sea shanties (“Sailor Song”), absurdist proclamations (“Ambulance Man,” which sounds like a lost chapter from the Book of Revelation), back-porch strumming (“The Big Surprise”), and wooly bursts of hoarse, bluesy rock (“Memphis Flu”).

Like the music they’re clearly drawing inspiration from, the Felices also know how to mix the personal with the universal, the abstract with the specific: Though their music is filled with out-there imagery and fairy-tale logic, there’s no denying the palpable sense of longing in “The Big Surprise,” or the vivid sense of time and place in “Penn Station,” or the mournful quality in “Chicken Wire.” These songs are as strange and as savage as the times in which they were borne—which, of course, makes them fairly timeless.

If there’s one crucial departure from the sound of The Basement Tapes, or of Depression-era country-blues, it’s this: They don’t play these songs with a smile on their faces. When Dylan did his thing, he did it with a big grin, often barely able to suppress the giggles. Like Dylan, the Felices have come up with a very funny set of songs, but they seem to have forgotten that fact when they entered the studio; they plow through these songs with a certain dourness, though, thankfully, not nearly as much so as on their overlong and too-somber self-titled album.

And anyway, they’re looser here than ever before, which is more than enough to make Yonder is the Clock a big step forward for a terrific young band that’s still coming into its own. But it’s more than that: It’s also a wonderfully weird, evocative album that finds its footing in a specific tradition, but transcends it through the sheer strength of its songs and its performances. And that… well, that’s pretty close to extraordinary.

Related posts:

1. Felice Brothers
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3. Bob Dylan – Together Through Life
4. Hoots and Hellmouth – The Holy Open Secret
5. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Cardinology

Tagged as: folk rock, New York

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