Review Article

As I could be accused of partisanship, I declare immediately my factiousness towards The Feelies of Bill Million and Glenn Mercer, one of the most important and underestimated bands of the 1980s.

It happened partly because their LPs (only four, between 1980 and 1991) have been among the first ones that I have purchased and partly because they've always championed the "do it by yourself" cause.

Cultured without being highbrow, elaborate without being self indulgent, confused without being verbose, The Feelies had just a"few happy" fans back in the 1980s, but the majority of these fans soon formed a band: furthermore, the unpredictable (but effective) way they mixed new-wave and rock'n'roll, minimalists geometries and electric jolts stands the test of time.

The accidental partnership between Million and Mercer (they both were timewaster students in the New Jersey) and various musicians led the band to look like a melting pot of people since their very first album.

On Crazy Rhytms (1980) the rhythm section is in charge of Anton Fier (drums) and Keith DeNunzio (bass guitar), and their mood contributes to the martial dazed folk-rock hypnosis of the album.

After six years (!), The Good Earth (1986) shuffled the deck: Brenda Sauter on fiddle, Dave Wackerman on percussions and (the incredible) Stan Demeski on drums completed the line-up. The album sounds much more rootsy than the previous one.

The same line-up performed on the following Only Life (1988) and on the garage-rock lashes of Time For A Witness (1991).

I would definitely choose Only Life as the most representative album of the band, because it summarizes the characteristics of the first two records (the nervous Crazy Rhytms and the rootsy The Good Earth) without forgetting to foretell the heavier style of the last record.

Some consider Only Life too much ordinary, some others too much cautious, but to me it sounds like the best possible summary of The Feelies many poetics and the band's propensity to slip with irony and fatalism between experimental parenthesis and the American tradition, turning spikes of punk and sudden raids in the most glacial and hallucinated folk.

Only Life shows everything and its opposite: this doesn't mean, nevertheless, that the tracks of the album are in disharmony one to another. Vice versa, it's as if every change of direction could illuminate the old trajectory with a new light Million and Mercer pay tribute to Lou Reed's obsessive talkin' both in the glowing cover of What Goes and in Away (a revised and corrected country-rock paraphrase of Heroin) . The folk-jazz improvisations of Too Much, the psych bourdons of Only Life, the r'n'r jumps of Deep Fascination, the implacable new-wave fidgets of Too Far Gone, the "ambient" rides of For Awhile and the non-stop tour-de-force- of drums and percussions of The Undertow complete the picture with puzzling naturalness.

Reissued by Runt in 2008 with no bonus tracks, Only Life stands out as a must-have classic; Higher Ground (one of the greatest rock songs of all times) firmly remains anchored to its own part of eternity, and The Feelies must be considered a band to know at all costs.