From Dreams to Dust may be The Felice Brothers most ambitious, densest and experimental work to date; it may also be their finest hour.
The Felice Brothers – From Dreams To Dust
Yep Roc – 17 September 2021
Joined by the new rhythm section of drummer Will Lawrence and their first female member, bassist Jesske Hume, brothers Ian and James Felice return with their fourth album for Yep Roc. Again mixing up mood and messages, they hit the road with the steady driving drum beat of Jazz on the Autobahn, a talking blues with doo-wop backing vocals and horns that tells how “the sheriff” and Helen (“somebody else’s wife, the heiress of Texas oil”) take a road trip “in a doomed Corvette”, haunted by a feeling of an impending apocalypse that she describes as “a tornado with human eyes poisoned birdbaths and torrents of chemical rain like the heads of state hyperventilating in clouds of methane …it’ll sound like final jeopardy but somehow be ghostly like a glockenspiel like the testing of bombs or the tapping of stiletto heels”. He, on the other hand, “tried to make a distinction between death and extinction”, arguing “there will be no angels with swords, no jubilant beings in the sky above and it won’t look like those old movies neither no drag racing through the bombed out streets …the successful sons of business men will set their desks on fire while 5 star generals of the free world weep in the oil choked tide”. As you might surmise, it is about emptiness, feeling lost and desire. And pretty catchy too.
That sense of putting your house in order continues into the equally tumbling drums anchored jaunty, Bob Dylan-tinged To-Do List in which, between piano and electric guitar breaks, the narrator variously determines to “Return everything that I’ve borrowed …become a lot more happy ..befriend an unfortunate lunatic …have an affair in the provinces… finish the Wealth of Nations… open the blinds, let the light in…acquire more guilty pleasures …throw out all the songs I wrote Oh and buy a buckskin coat”.
Things are moodier on the piano-accompanied All The Way Down, essentially a meditation on existence and artificial intelligence (“There’s no one to pray to/Because you know who made you/And you can just ask me/You are the union/Of an ape in an apron/And a break in the clouds”), while, starting with a vocally treated spoken piece before the drums and guitars kick in they observe how Money Talks “with a voice as shrill/As the hiss of a chemical spill…like a dial tone the suicide and the open phone… with a voice of fear panic buttons and riot gear”), once more touching on images of doomsday. Then, arriving on piano and organ notes, mortality is the basis for the wry Be At Rest from whence the album title comes. It plays out as a spoken funeral elegy for “Mr. Felice, 6’ 148 lbs, soft teeth, sleep deprived, below average student/Owner of 2 ill-fitting suits/Wearer of hand me downs/Often lukewarm, withdrawn/bathrobe often loosely tied”, concluding “To his son he leaves a cloudless sky/One pair of ill-fitting shoes/to his wife a draw of undeveloped negatives/a bowl of onion soup”.
Tentative piano and Mike Mogis’s pedal steel underpin Valium, another spoken number that illuminates Ian’s literary writing, the narrator holed up in a “motel on the border of Utah and Colorado” watching John Wayne and Annie Oakley clips on television manifesting a “tragic idealization of the American West”, channel surfing from a presidential debate to an ad for a “picture perfect dinner”, the number a musing on the “valium for the national consciousness”.
Elsewhere the album further touches on themes of disillusionment (the sparse, desert-dry acoustic guitar and piano Neil Young-like Inferno with its references to Cobain, Jean-Claude van Damme, and The Karate Kid), existential crisis prompted by external forces (the slow bluesy shuffle Silverfish “Some guy from Leeds sends my girlfriend memes…I gotta do something”) and the vacuous nature of celebrity culture (the musical shape-shifting Celebrity X – “celebrity N asks a downcast celebrity M if her marriage is hell to celebrity L”).
It draws to a close with, first, the atmospheric drone intro to the haunted introspective reflective speak-sing The Land Of Yesterdays (“I’m running blindly after neon trains in the land of yesterdays/the moon like fire in the horses manes/in the land of yesterdays/shadows are falling on a tender plain/you can never return”), shading to gospel influences for the Dylan-styled conversation delivery of Blow Him Apart, a pedal steel washed observation of a brutal kiss-off (“I talk shit/When I’m afraid/But I watched you blow him apart/Like a meteor/They’ll find pieces of that boy’s heart/When they get to Mars”).
Finally, again echoing classic Dylan, comes the eight-minute spoken narrative We Shall Live Again, an upbeat transcendent affirmation of how, while “a great extinction is close at hand”, the life cycle turns and continues, that not only references Hegel, Proust and Grandma Moses but brilliantly contrives to rhyme Francis of Assisi with “the fans of AC/DC”, testifying “I find these truths to be self-evident/in this life where any joyful thing is paid two fold in suffering/we shall live again” because “this world is ours and all the stars/it’s like the frosting on the cake of death and the only word that rhymes is breath”. Their most ambitious, densest and experimental work to date, it may also be their finest hour.
From Dreams to Dust is out now.