Simone Felice

★★★

All The Bright Coins CHRYSALIS. CD/DL/LP

Former Felice Brother and Lumineers/Lana Del Rey producer resumes his solo career.

After 2018’s The Projector,

Simone Felice had been busy concentrating on his luminous production and songwriting work, until, inevitably, the day job beckoned once more. This means a succession of haunting story songs (not for nothing does Felice cite Harry Chapin as a touchstone), where Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden guests and The Webb Sisters, late of Leonard Cohen, add ghostly backing vocals. No Tomorrows deals with his brain aneurysm, while Puppet echoes, of all things, Black Sabbath’s Changes. Closing track After The Rain, meanwhile, is a hymnal balm. Less happily, he’s made a part return to his original calling as a spoken word poet. So, the transcendent songs are entwined with spoken monologues augmented by intermittent backing and the sort of lyrical silliness that leads the track 90s to announce, “Byron and Keats were long gone, but we had Ghostface Killah and Neil Young”. They’ll probably work well live, though.