My new “Ties That Bind” column is up at PopMatters, this time around concerning The Felice Brothers’ music which I lovingly think of as “flea-market music”:
With the release of “Plunder”, there are now two new Felice Brothers singles in advance of the group’s forthcoming album, Life in the Dark. Both songs sound like they were made from a flea market. Not about a flea market, or at a flea market. From a flea market. Of it, born from it, cobbled together or fashioned from pearl-handled baby spoons, Amish clocks, weathered license plates, frayed copies of Life magazine, beat-up ukuleles, cigarette smoke, dried mud, and the lazy cacophony of hagglers, collectors, and weekend comedians. Neither song is dressed as kitsch or irony; they’re not dressed “as” anything. Each is simply the expendable, the boxed-up and unpacked, the well-handled, common, and priced-to-sell stuff of shopworn America that someone thinks ought to be worth something to somebody. And it is.
I was stuck on what to write about for a while, then heard “Aerosol Ball” and things clicked. “Plunder” came out while I was finishing the piece. Not much in the way of extended thoughts right now. It’s all there.
Robert Loss 