Every day this week, we’re posting a video to whet the appetite for the Black Deer Festival, which begins today! This year’s line-up is incredible and one of the acts appearing today, 17th June, is AUK favourites The Felice Brothers. Here we have ‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the highlight from one of 2021’s best albums ‘From Dreams to Dust’. What an album that is – fresh, exciting, adventurous. The feeling of hearing something utterly new and different is rare but the Felice Brothers managed it with this sophisticated record that takes us through the journey of life ‘from dreams to dust’ and everything in-between, the whole sweeping narrative of what it means to be human. The loss and sadness is balanced against the magic of the everyday and, above all, it just feels good to listen to. Somehow, despite being bleak at times, it is incredibly uplifting. Even a funereal song like ‘Be at Rest’, when Ian Felice shares his self-penned obituary, manages elevate us above the doom and find the humour at the heart of life.
It’s irreverent and slightly mad, never more so than on ‘Jazz on the Autobahn’; who else could write a song that features a conversation about the apocalypse and make it sound like such fun? The accompanying video bursts with life and colour, a wild animation that is full of fleeting images, perfectly reinforcing the vivid words. Hearing the crowd sing along will be one of the finest moments of the festival: “Does it feel like jazz? // Jazz, jazz, jazz // Jazz on the autobahn!” See in the Deer Park.
