[rating=7.00]
Since leaving The Felice Brothers, Simone Felice has created truly cinematic contemporary folk music, in his collaborations such as The Duke & The King as well as on his own. Strangers expands on the scope of production from the previous eponymous album, but Felice maintains a rigorous restraint that stands him in good stead.
“Hey Molly-O” betrays perhaps his most overt display of influence as it echoes Bob Dylan’s vocal style of 1966. Yet the singing is set in a streamlined rock structure that reveals small turns of phrase that distinguish the lyrics. Orchestration on “If You Go to LA” is just this side of lush, but “Running Through My Head” swells to that very level, only to break, and leave Felice’s voice as solitary as that of his female accompanist Leah Siegel. Simone Felice peppers his music with such dramatic flourishes without calling attention to them.
Religious references such as that of “Our Lady of the Gun” are likewise rife in these songs he’s composed with co-producer David Baron. But while Felice imbues the cryptic likes of those lyrics with a certain sanctimony, he counters with the soulful warmth in his voice there and also on “Bye Bye Palenville,” an element further fostered on the latter through the use of an ever so simple horn arrangement that bolsters the personal connection Simone’s aiming for.
It’s a mark of the versatility within Strangers that the sing-along quality in action on “Gettysburg” doesn’t clash with that previous cut. The inclusion of banjo, however, lends a lighthearted air prominent at both beginning and end of the track, so that the comparatively quiet intimacy of “The Best That Money Can Buy,” borne from a single acoustic guitar alternated with cello, sounds like a natural segue. Felice and Baron apply as much attention to detail in the instrumentation as the former does with the words to his songs — not surprising given his history as a writer of prose — the result of which is a track like “Bastille Day,” which evokes an expansive introspection.
If it weren’t for “The Gallows,” where the vulnerability in Simone Felice’s voice heightens that very same mood, it’d be an ideal conclusion to Strangers; as it is, this final cut offers a gentle culmination to an almost dizzying excursion through the hearts and souls of the vivid characters that inhabit his songs.
