The Felice Brothers The Felice Brothers WB rating out of 100

The Felice Brothers are (you guessed it) three brothers: Simone (vocals, drums, guitars), Ian (vocals, guitars, piano) and James (vocals, accordion, organ, piano, strings), and friend Christmas (bass), who all hale from New York’s Catskill Mountains. Their debut album, The Felice Brothers, details stories of drinking, love, murder and heartache, these yarns offered up in a board-stomping, beer-swigging hailstorm of motley country blues.

Simple and iconic blues progressions are given the once over and injected with a fresh dose of melodic instrumentation: horns, accordion, violin and some killer piano arrangements. Lyrically, the album plays on themes and images closely related to rural America, the Hillbilly standards of Buffalo Bill, gun slinging, drinking and partying. But a major factor setting The Felice Brothers apart is their sibling status. The recording captures a raw quality to their musicianship, possibly crafted and honed during their younger days when they performed songs in their backyard on Sunday afternoons. Having grown up writing lyrics and poetry has afforded them enough poetic licence to tenderly cast some storytelling magic on tracks such as ‘Take This Bread’, ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ and the melancholic ‘Wonderful Life’, the well-used themes sparked with the much needed touch of imagination.

At times poetically honest and at others wrapped up in allegory, the band’s lyrics detail the nitty-gritty facts of life on the road as a group of broke bandits. On ‘Love me Tenderly’, Ian admits “my baby told me/if you can’t get a pardon/better get a parole” before brother James launches into a boisterous piano solo. Rather than sounding like the studio crafted album it is, the Felice Brothers manage to instil authenticity in the recording by capturing subtle flaws. Their howling harmonies sound more like rowdy drunken sing-along’s and are therefore, in this setting, ideally suited in their imperfection. On ‘Love Me Tenderly’, Ian seems to list the essential elements to the Felice Brothers philosophy “a bottle of gin/a typewriter/and a violin/wouldn’t you like that?”

The Felice Brothers have been compared to Bob Dylan, a young Bruce Springsteen and particularly The Band’s Music from Big Pink record and these parallels are evident on this album. However, rather than going through someone else’s motions though, the Felice Brothers trademark their very own brand of Americana, each song brimming with distinctiveness.

The Felice Brothers is rooted in tradition and provides some seriously good toe-tapping tunes which hark back to folk, blues, country and rock. It’s the kind of music you imagine listening to as you swat flies from your face while sitting on your creaky porch at dusk, or dance to on shaky floorboards in rundown old taverns. Dishing up lyrical weight as it weaves through tales of the characters and the landscape of rural America, The Felice Brothers’ debut is much like the snakeskin of a cowboy boot: it tastes like the dried up whiskey caked on a bar, smells like blood and has a longevity that belies its initial appearance.