On their new album Undress, the Felice Brothers waste no time pursuing the implications of the album’s title. But, to hear Ian Felice almost immediately call out both Democrats and Republicans and America at large on the very first track is provocative to say the least.
Still, as the electric piano ripples and horns waft behind his wry lead vocal, the images of Wall Street, Family Feud and other cultural touchpoints receive their due with a healthy detachment. Underscored with vocal harmonies and sharp twisting electric guitar fills, the attitude of the quartet–now consisting of Ian, his brother James playing keyboards plus a rhythm section of Jesske Hume on bass and Will Lawrence on drums–becomes one of honest bemusement laced with serious concern.
It is oblique commentary akin to that permeating Son Volt’s Union, certainly the most topically relevant piece of work we are likely to encounter this year apart from this one. As these dozen original songs unfold, the Felices proffer other images like “TV Mama” through which they unite both personal and universal relevance. Meanwhile, spare instrumental accompaniment combined with Ian’s deceptively expressive singing forcefully clarifies the subject of such songs as “Holy Weight Champ:” we know who he’s talking about—or do we?
That kind of purposeful ambiguity lends itself to open interpretation, a useful tool by which the Felice Brothers avoid the polemics and proselytizing that is so off-putting in the realm of social commentary. For instance, the group avoids undercutting its subject on “Salvation Army Girl,” by fashioning a high-spirited romp, complete with the horns of saxophonists Geoff Vidal and Kate Anderson and trumpeter Larry Moses, that begs for singalong. And “Special Announcement” works much the same way, that is, ostensibly an intention tool for projection via role-playing, it’s the archetypal drinking song, a la “Whiskey In My Whiskey” off the Brothers’ Adventures of Vol. 1.
Barrel-house piano tinkling throughout that cut doesn’t evoke the sound of the latter-day Band as vividly as the accordion on “Nail It On the First Try,” but the brevity of the latter only accentuates a despair pervading Ian’s wan delivery. “Jack Reminiscing” is a more conventional country song, complete with a woeful pedal steel courtesy Peter Adams, but it echoes back to the roots of the genre in Appalachian folk music. It’s at this point Undress begins to (not wholly unfavorably) resemble the somber ruminations of Ian’s 2017 solo album, In The Kingdom of Dreams, but unlike that thoroughly splendid record, another upbeat cut would alleviate the slightly ponderous air arising at this point in this track sequence.
In contrast, “Days of the Year” rivets attention with the level of detail in the carefully-wrought characters and locale. As does “Poor Blind Birds,” while more poetry akin to a great short story arrives in a different form with the skeletal banjo on “Hometown Hero:” the depiction of honor arrives draped in irony. Having invoked literary icons such as William Faulkner and Washington Irving (whose work evokes the foursome’s home in New York’s Catskill Mountains), the Felice Brothers then have the audacity to to close Undress with a reference to Plato; on “Socrates” the somber tones of Adele “14K” Schulz’s French horn accentuates the sparse sound of the foursome, thereby magnifying the composition’s allusions to democracy and tyranny in a song–and on an album–where the authors’ statements couldn’t be more clear. Or self-effacing. The verbal, melodic and production understatement (the latter overseen by long-time studio mentor Jeremy Backofen) compels close listening to Undress, not just to comprehend the point(s) the group’s trying to make, but to appreciate the finely-tuned care with which they have offered their observations and asked their questions.
