You may have heard of his family, but listen to him

The Felice Brothers were: lead singer Ian who channels Dylan more often than not, squeeze box squeezer James who can flip from Appalacian gothic to New Orleans zydeco in a flash and drummer Simone who probably grew up with pictures of Band drummer/vocalist Levon Helm on his ceiling.

We say “were” because Simone has left the Catskill Mountains’ nest where this act - the quartet was completed with a crap-shooting mate improbably called Christmas Clapton – has lived and worked since skipping the New York City home their carpenter father built.

Simone has teamed up with Robert “the chicken” Burke, who was a sideman for George Clinton, and made a brilliant, genius debut disc Nothing Gold Can Stay going by the band name of The Duke and The King (referenced from the Felice Bros’ favourite author Mark Twain who had these characters in his Huck Finn yarns).

The CD is out next week and should be in the best selling charts if there was such a thing these days.

It is cleaner, with more pop nods and winks than the often raucous Felice Brothers sound. But it marks the development of a new powerhouse singer songwriter, from the opening song, If You Ever Get Famous, a soft but complete country-soul tune that could have been penned by Stephen Stills (or even Gordon Lightfoot) in the late 1960s, to the truly moving One More American Song which closes the selection.

This Felice Brother is living up to his promise, first seen on the song Don’t Wake the Scarecrow from the band’s eponymous CD which tells a tale of whores, loss and drugs in a mountain town.

Listen to how he relates the New York street life story in Union Street, from his new CD, which begins: “I got the highest heels on the street/But they don’t get me as high as I want to be”. It’s an honest and direct piece of story-telling which marks Simone as possibly he best new singer-songwriter around.

The CD has two real psychedelic dream tunes which have just two or three lines each. There’s the keyboard based, wall of sound retreat Lose My Self which just overwhelms the listener with rich instrumentation and then the more prosaic I’ve Been Bad (entire lyric: “Woke up this morning/I was thinking of you/Oh oho, I’ve been bad”) which has nothing more than a delicious acoustic guitar and Simone’s vocal.

But the full potential of Simone Felice’s talent can be found on that final tune, One More American Song, a masterwork about small town America in post-war bad times.

It’s worth relaying some of the lyric at length: “John was a quiet boy in school/Johnny with the fiery red hair/He went in the army, like a lot of them do/And he got fucked up over there/And if you see him now, he pushes a shopping cart in the parking lot/If you call him, he don’t hear a thing/They call him John The Priest, John The King Of Bottle Tops/Priest or pawn, his war’s still on/It’s just one more American song.”

It’ll move you and it will stop you.

The whole record is a triumph for the oldest of the Felice Brothers - the remaining brothers have decided to keep going and have just announced a new tour with Justin Townes Earle, the Old Crow Medicine Show and Dave Rawlins’s new outfit called the Machine (imagine that night out!) - and it delivers us a talent that’s as good as it’s rare.

This is now an emerging sound. The Felice Brothers, who recorded one of their albums – the last one, the great song soaked Yonder Is The Clock – in chicken coop, have produced a sound that transcends the comparisons to Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and the Band.

They’ve got deep roots reaching down into those wells – and it’s not just the fact that these are folk who love being in cold places, playing hot music fuelled by booze and other darker passions.

It’s also music that fits so neatly with the description first coined by historian and journalist Greil Marcus about the Band when he said they echoed “old, weird America”.

Now that Simone Felice has stepped up as a distinct voice from the family we are hearing something richer and stronger. The band will have a great future. Simone has one that will reach even greater heights.