Feelies

Since its inception at Max's in New York in 1976, the Feelies of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million (both students in nearest New Jersey, and both singers, guitarists and composers), with Anton Fier (formerly in the Electric Eels) on drums, occupied a place of honor in the ranks of the experimental song of the new wave. From the beginning the group always remained on the fringes of the commercial circuit, so much so that the first recording (the 45 rpm Fa Ce La) took place only in 1979. As if that were not enough, they played in public very rarely, mostly during the holidays.

Fier left the Feelies to form the Golden Palominos.

The folkrock of Crazy Rhythms (Stiff), the historic 1980 album, recorded with Andy Fisher (Anton Fier) on drums and Keith Clayton on bass, is cold and alienating, like an android clone of the Byrds. The frantic strumming of the guitars, mostly "treated" electronically, on pop melodies with nonsense lyrics and neurotic rhythms, brings them closer to the decadent delusions of the Velvet Underground and the minimalist trance. On the brio and ease of traditional genres such as vaudeville and country & western, the Feelies inject lethal doses of modern elements: psychedelic guitar bursts, obsessive repetitions of patterns, hypnotic vocalizations, exasperated percussion; until you lose the sense of what they are playing.

The hypnotic chords of Moscow Nights, the "railway" boogie of Forces At Work, the epic pow-wow of The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness (with the wild tribalism of Fier’s drumming in the foreground), the epileptic gospel of their cover of the Beatles’Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey, the novelty Fa Ce La, the "acid" jam of the title track all combine a demonic quality with hermetic and spartan arrangements, they oscillate between ecstatic transcendence and detached decadence, alien to any drama, incapable of reaching a climax or end. The vocal harmonies are humble and modest to the point of anemia; the sound so ascetic that it is sometimes more similar to the Gregorian canon than to rock and roll. Some pieces (Loveless Love) exhibit such a geometric structure that they seem more oriental meditation exercises than folk songs; although their inspiration is clearly from psychedelic, or rather irrational at best. Yet each song manages to bring this minimal infrastructure, of a pastoral and religious character, into a frenzy of an urban and secular nature. Thus, shyness is combined with aggression, simplicity with depth and contemplation at the dance. From this practice of contrasts and interlocking comes the best assorted soundtrack to represent the neuroses of the era.

At this point it appeared that the group was already dead. They were gone, as they had come, in the twilight of the underground, returning to the amateur circuit.

Only in 1984 did the composing duo come back to life, with a short-run EP of soft psychedelia, Explorers Hold (Coyote, 1984), recorded by a seven-piece formation, the Trypes, which would later evolve into Speed The Plough and in the Wild Carnation.

The Feelies resurrected with Good Earth (Coyote, 1986) and a new line-up, a quintet that includes the prodigious Stan Demeski (drums), Dave Weckerman (percussion) and Brenda Sauter (bass and violin). The sound became more melodic and relaxed, bordering on the velvetier side of country-rock (On The Roof) and the more crystalline folk-rock (High Road), with increasingly hallucinated instrumental scores, obsessive accelerations of percussive guitarism and an insistent recourse to repetitive tremelo a la Branca. Surreal pasticas like Two Rooms, which renews the glories of the first album, neurotic hoe-downs like Last Roundup, Velvet trenodies like Slipping, distorted and obsessive ragas like Tomorrow Today and anguished ballads like Good Earth bring to mind images of a "wasteland", an extremely degraded landscape.

Only Life (Coyote, 1988) will thus be the Mannerist apex of their art-rock, capable of cooking together ideas taken from Brian Eno (For Awhile), from raga-rock (Too Much), from folk (the epic Higher Ground), from country and western (Away), from hard rock (Deep Fascination), from minimalism (Too Far Gone), from psychedelia (Only Life). The quintet is perfectly matched. Demeski, in particular, wins the palm as one of the greatest drummers of his generation.

A diversity that has always kept the public in suspense, the Feelies return after three years of silence in 1991 with their fourth album in fifteen years. Time For A Witness (A&M) is a deafening, almost heavymetal record, compared to the almost acoustic rehearsals of the 80s, and the transformation, while retaining the characteristics of the past (the frenetic guitar chords, the truncated solos, the layered rhythms of two percussionists, the icy and detached vocalizations) enhances even more the affinity with the style of Lou Reed (especially on Decide and What She Said), with the garage-rock of the sixties (Waiting) and with the most abstract acidrock (like the long delirium of Find A Way, in a riot of light percussion and guitar chords that gives rise to a long tail of instrumental jamming).

But the trademark of the Feelies, that accelerating or syncopating the rhythm to enter in a way that is at the same time frenetic and controlled, is now an artificial cliché: the problem, as Million himself pointed out, is that the rhythms of Crazy Rhythms were "crazy" because the group did not know how to play (and did not have the time to rehearse enough before recording the record), while now it is a matter of reinventing the rhythm while knowing how to play it correctly. And then to use it as a "support" on which to graft bluegrass songs (Time For A Witness), Dylanian ballads (Sooner Or Later) or simply beautiful pop melodies (Invitation). In this "cubist" art the new Feelies reach a stylistic perfection that borders on mannerism.

Mercer and Weckerman will return to lead Wake Ooloo, with Russ Gambino on keyboards and John Dean on bass. Hear No Evil (Pravda, 1994), the debut, flows in a much more traditional way, without great creative jolts, with "regular" songs like Nobody Heard, Forty Days, Another Song. Mercer tries a care-free and yet a more annoying sound (Anything and Too Long Gone seem like Television ballads), but above all the ideas seem to lack (Rise is practically a cover of You Really Got Me) and in the end, he takes refuge in the old Feelies sound (Don't Look Now).

On What About It (Pravda, 1995) the two songwriters amplify the music and reduce the rhythmic trappings. If we add to this the inevitable calm of forty years, the result is a typical American bar-band with no frills, very much tied to the country and blues traditions, and anchored around a very intriguing riff. That riff "is" the Feelies. It is recognized immediately. But the legacy of the Feelies ends there. Depending on your taste this can be one of the great roots-rock records (Don't Look Now), or a pale copy of themselves. Stop The Ride (Konkurrel, 1996) continues the descent into roots-rock for elderly ex-punk with increasingly less creative songs (Too Many Times, Stiff).

Along with Television, the Feelies were the major innovators of the guitar pop song from the post-punk scene. Their basic form is made up of short melodic vocalizations poised between different genres, followed by a long instrumental coda-jam in which the languages ​​are completely confused, between the hard riffs of Million, the "lysergic" strumming of Mercer, the martial cadences of Brenda Sauter's bass, and the maniacal tribalisms of Dave Weckerman's drums.

The Feelies (guitarists Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, bassist Brenda Sauter, drummer Stanley Demeski, and percussionist Dave Weckerman) reunited for Here Before (Bar None, 2011), a diligent sequel to their masterpieces.

In Between (2017) is mostly disposable, mostly mellow and mostly acoustic. Things improve towards the end with Time Will Tell and the nine-minute In Between, one of their most experimental compositions.