SIMONE FELICE - The Projector

When can an album be called courageous? I don't have an answer to that question, but I have few doubts about the courage shown by Simone Felice, former member of the Felice Brothers, who after coming close to the line between life and death in 2010, pieced back together a life that was ready to crumble: first returning to the scene in 2014 with an album full of sunlit melancholy (“Strangers”), then throwing himself headlong into the most ambitious and riskiest project of his career.

“The Projector” is what could be called, for an artist, commercial suicide: the conciliatory, winning atmospheres of his old band and the pleasant folk-rock-pop blend of his solo albums are now a thing of the past. Accompanying him on this painful passage from light to darkness are studio wizard Four Tet, the elfin, fantastical voice of Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes), and the more understated one of Rachael Yamagata.

For Simone Felice, “The Projector” is his own “Nebraska”, but while for Bruce Springsteen that solitary, enchanting intimate episode was a moment of peace and reflection within an otherwise thunderous stylistic path, for the forty-two-year-old from Palenville the new album represents a point of no return, where the power of the lyrics is finally sealed by music that is just as intense and anguished.

It's a deeply narrative record, perfectly set between the aching, bluesy poetry of the title track (“for all this time you felt so alone, but for all this time there were wrong-number phone calls and you weren't alone”), and the evocative metaphor of “War Movie”: where the subject of the conflict is the ever-difficult, complicated relationship between a man and a woman (“I held the phone in the dark, your voice on the other end is so far away, you say you'll never break my heart, but that's how a war movie starts”).

Felice's poetics have thus shifted slightly from Bob Dylan (“The Hustler”) toward Leonard Cohen (the spoken-word delivery of “They'd Hang Upon My Every Word”) and, why not, Nick Cave (“The Fawn”). The result is not only intense and evocative (“To Be You, To Be Me”, “Angel By My Side”) but also original and distinct from what other songwriters have offered along the same lines (“You Shall Be My Eve”, “Your Hands”), thanks in part to the disorienting collaborations which, though they might have looked somewhat contrived and ambiguous on paper, instead seal Felice's masterpiece with class, poetry and creativity.

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01/11/2018