‘Life In The Dark’ by The Felice Brothers (Album)

The Felice Brothers: the feeling of a family get-together which just so happens to have been captured on tape

Now over a decade into their career and these talented musicians are still offering up delicious helpings of loose alt-country

The new album from The Felice Brothers continues where their last, Favorite Waitress, left off. Recorded in a rented garage-turned-recording-studio in Hudson Valley, NY, it is a relaxed and lyrically vivid collection of songs that has the feeling of a family get-together which just so happens to have been captured on tape.

Raised in the Catskill Mountains, now relocated to upstate New York, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, but this far into their career the band’s bric-a-brac Americana deserves to be judged on its own merit. Tracks such as Jack At The Asylum, Sally! and Dancing On The Wing have a loose charm to them, the kind of life-affirming jam that has served the band so well since their 2005 debut.

Album opener Aerosol Ball is a fiddle led toe-tapper, Diamond Bell a questing ballad about the gunslinging lady of the title and Plunder is the album’s scorching rocker which allows Ian Felice to flex his lyrical imagination and bid “Farewell to gravity / Farewell to pageantry / Farewell to savagery / And to your majesty”. Life In The Dark is a healthy dose of gnarly alt-country and everything you want from The Felice Brothers.

Verdict: The Felice Brothers at their peak

Duncan Haskell

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