Not Pop Records 1 95269 35581 4
everlasting elegy
Arlan Feiles’ ninth album only contains nine songs: eight he wrote himself and a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Story of Isaac’. It fits in seamlessly with the other songs, because on this thematic album Feiles poses big questions about his Jewish origins, ant-Semitism and the Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip. He does so in a musical mix of singer-songwriter, roots, folk and klezmer, but he always builds in a lot of space in his songs.
Feiles himself plays the double bass, the acoustic and Weissenborn guitar, the piano and organ. In Addition, Brad Gunyon plays the drums in two songs and David Mansfield plays the mandolin in three, which he combines with violin once and with Weissenborn one other time. Carmen Sciafani plays the slide guitar once and there are only three songs with backing singers: in ‘Oh, St. Louis’ it is Layonne Holmes and in ‘Ceasefire’ Tessa, Layla and Noah Feiles sing.
His songs are European-tinged because of the combination of genres and breathe the atmosphere of lamentations with the bare but penetrating sound and often repetitive music.
These elements provide a lot of emphasis on his lyrics, also because of his vocals, that are mixed to the front. Even more than on albums like ‘Blame Me’ and ‘What Kind of World’, Feiles interweaves the personal with the political in his lyrics, because he audibly struggles with the contradiction between his origins and the political reality of today: his ancestors came from Europe to the new world, but that destination has abandoned him.
In his songs he seems to sing about his family history more or less chronologically:
the opener ‘I Know Your Number’ is about the identification numbers that the Germans tattooed on the forearms of Jews in the concentration camps during World War II, while in the closing song ‘Ceasefire (Shalom Achshav)’ he passionately calls for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza
Strip, precisely because ‘I was taught to ask questions/I was taught to seek truth/I was taught to find wisdom and nourish my roots/I was taught to show kindness’.
In between he sings about love and loss: he empathizes with a man who survived World War II, but cannot forget his dead lover until old age (‘Budapest 1936’), he sings about the German ocean liner St. Louis that was refused was refused entry to Cuba, the US and Canada in 1939 with nine hundred Jewish refugees on board and had to return to Europe. He also accuses the perpetrators of the lynching of a wrongly convicted American Jew kidnapped from prison (“Leo Frank (Hang Him High)”) and sings of the cruel coincidence of circumstances that makes people scapegoats (“Broken World Order”).
In all these songs, Feiles desperately but passionately calls for humanity. His lyrics confront and grate even more because of the melancholic, accessible melodies. It results in a song cycle that is a desperate cry for justice and therefore an unprecedentedly impressive album.
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