The Felice Brothers

Bob Dylan and The Band. Right, now that apathetic analogy's been cast we can get on with it properly.

The Felice Brothers hail from an area in upstate New York, a small town set in its mediocre routine and live-and-die aimless philosophy. Surrounded by very little it's the sort of dead end place that sculpts your predictable future for you. Escaping is rare and an output of creativity is even rarer. It's a hard unwritten law to upstage when you're expected to march to the blunt, future-less drum of your predecessors and take over the family business.

But thankfully for us, The Felice Brothers (three of whom are actually brothers) have romantically embarked on the illicit, folklore journey that sees them living out of old buses on a pittance playing their heartily-painful folk blues from dusk till dawn. This is the dream though, the real fucking pilgrimage of folk legends, upping sticks and travelling the mighty country in search of nothing in particular but finding everything.

Despair, bleakness, misery and death are strange things. A spanner in the cogs of the tred of every day life and fundamentally always unwelcome, but it's these gloomy episodes that fuel the greatest music in the world. If people didn't sing about heartbreak, suffering and the torture of love and love lost there would be no great art left, just happy fucking people running around, holding hands and hugging in fields of lucky charms.


Despite The Felice Brothers uplifting ditty's and waltz-y accordion squeezes there is heartache and grief in their folk songs, and it's not the heartbreak that most know, it's real desolation and real woe, the likes of which many of us will never know. 'Frankie's Gun' begins to paint a picture of such sorrow, but one that shows heart behind actions. Accordion's busk over the husky howl of a heart-draining tale concerned with a lack of money and a not-so-legal way of obtaining it. It soon becomes clear that brilliance of this sort is hard to come by nowadays. Country music by individuals who have lived their lives, people who have crossed the darkside and came back fighting with their foot stompin' Fender riffs brandished proudly on their sleeves. It's a vivaciously marvelous song and one that shows the Felice Brothers to be the outlaw, rock-folkster's whose days we all thought had past.

Having only just got into their first album I feel like I've got a lot of ground to cover. I've only just managed to get over the gloomy, booze fuelled waltz that is 'Put Some Whiskey In My Whiskey'. Its simple foundation challenges nothing but really takes whatever it wants. Suicidal almost, a dark shadow looms over the low bellow of James Felice who takes over the vocals for this song.


This mythological brotherhood is a folk saga in the making. The venture behind such lyrical novels sometimes seems a little too cliche to be true. Recruiting travelling dice rollers to play bass, busking the New York subway and wallowing in the gutter of defeat, to now, having the potential to upstage folk and country music as we know it today - Embodying endless possibilities with a fiddle player and an accordion, two instruments that some how now seem like the fucking coolest things in the world!

It's going to be a big year for The Felice brothers - modern day outlaw folk singers who know more about life than you, your friends and even your bloody parents, and the fact that these whiskey swigging, Marlboro men have climbed from the bottom of their bottles to the cusp of the heavens means we ain't getting rid of them for a long time. Good.

I'm not going to put a download up because I think you need to buy this one! plus I imagine i will get in trouble for it! So below is a video for 'Frankie's Gun'.