SIMONE FELICE
Simone Felice
Team Love 56

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The quiet opening track’s first sentence (with its protagonist born on the fourth of July to a cop and a coke-addicted hooker) reflects Felice’s worldview. For the gamblers he writes of, every roll of the dice takes a toll on your soul. Real-life psychotic lovers and mass slayers from the tabloids appear in some ballads, with interludes of la-la choruses (shades of upbeat ‘60s rock/pop) offering brief, incongruous respite. Richard Thompson is an optimist by comparison.

A former member of the Catskill Mountains’ rough-edged Felice Brothers, Simone here brings in his siblings and a local choir of high school girls, seeking out resonant recording sites – a local barn, an abandoned school, an old church in England – to capture a stillness, a quiet aura of the doomed seeking holy ground to no avail. Their future’s painted black in a land where raising a flag is easier than raising a son. — Bruce Sylvester