There's something about the act of discovering a new band, of making room in your mind for a new act, the character in a singer's voice, a new recognition, an understanding that starts the first time you hear and artist's work and is reconsidered for every track and for every note you hear of theirs afterwards, and with each record comes this anticipation that the record is going to be as good, if not better than the last one.

Sometimes it takes a committed act, on behalf of the listener, as sometimes what initially sounds like a disappointment, ends up being something remarkable later on down the line when given the advantage the distance and time to mature and appreciate.

The way in which a record changes in the ears of the listener says as much about who we are as people, and how generous the listeners mind is to receiving this new information.

The last time I wrote a review for this band, I had, only recently, come across a record that only comes along every once in a while, maybe once every two years or so, but its hard to recapture the hold they had on me, the first time I heard "Scarecrow" sung by the Felice Brothers bassist, Christmas, the way the tone in his was new to me, my brain making room for a new act, a new voice.

I saw them live first, and that night introduced me to so many compelling characters, and if you could have seen these guys play live on that tour, and seen them, drunk in the alleys of the cities they played in, lived out their characters, the ones they sang about, there wasn't any difference between the guys in the band who would, like Kerouac or Ken Kesey, traveled thousands of miles to make revelry, these five gentlemen who make up the Felice Brothers, they were and are the real deal, the true weird Americans, the kind that don't exist anymore, an analog band for the digital age, they are the leftovers of vaudeville when we thought there weren't any left.

And with that brings the variety of songs, and how their songs seemed to have been worked on for years, maybe carried around in their short bus they use to tour the country with, slips of songs bursting out of their cases, and with all of the knockouts on "The Felice Brothers, " They seemed to have so many up their sleeve, and each of them as grand as the tracks on their last album. I thought they had hours of this top shelf class a material, and while "Yonder is the Clock" still boasts a few heavy hitters, it feels like a genuine come down.

And just like an old wino, inebriated on Wild Irish Rose and time, The Felice Brothers seem to be eternally looking back instead of forward, living in the lazy haze of broken time, only this time the words are too far gone, and the wino has lost a bit of the poet in him. For the songs on "Yonder…" are submerged, buried in ice, and the band is like a a drunk slumped in the alley, and while all of its living history might still be there, the drunk is nearly comatose.

Things start off with the lurching, "The Big Suprise" and once again, we are back in that special place, there's an odd amount of wisdom in Ian Felice's vocals, as the song is sung with the patience of a sage witnessing the passing of an epoch, looking back on moonshine bill passages, carpetbaggers, all the way back to the first settlers. It's the kind of opener that's an underhanded punch, whose weight you don't feel until you walk away from it awhile.

The unpredictable nature continues on "Penn Station", a rousing drunken chorus which lets the camera zoom back to see the whole drunken cast and crew of rascals and roustabouts, pulling out all the stops on their eternal vaudevillian tour.

"Buried in Ice" is barely sung straight, a-one-last-track-before-we-hit-the-sack kind of track, an old rousing chorus, punctuated by the kind of vocal gestures a drunk uses, emphasizing the wrong syllables, middles of sentences taking on a special meaning. And the spare piano in the background, lingering there, providing shape to the form of the block of ice that carries the question, is a lovely lifting thing.

"Cooperstown" succeeds in the way that all good Felice Brothers gems succeed, sounding like a song memorized several hundred times but you just cant think of at the moment, conjuring up the old glory days of baseball parks, the burnt acrid smell from after the fireworks have all been lit, the smell of sulfur when they take the lights down.

Four records in the Felice Brothers sound like they are not so much ready for a victory lap as they are for a nice lie down. But for all the distance of the first half of the record, the second half finds it's footing, dragging its slumped carcass across the finish line for an even draw. The songs on the second half have melodies with enough muster to allow their voices slide above their stupor long enough to cement a memory, and "Yonder…" begins to find its focus.

"Cooperstown", "Rise and Shine", "All When We Were Young", "Katie Dear", there is a heavy dose of loss here, a sense that by traveling as much as they do, they feel the need to touch down on the darker side of things, to linger long enough to kiss it goodbye.

Like the song "All When we Were Young" shows, these characters might be drunkenly alive, but there's an odd tone of somber reflection, a life of regret, of having to grow up and tell the same stories, but the stories and their joints don't move like they used to.

And it's refreshing how these songs are still deeply American, the kind of old weird America, the kind of history of the various wanderers, junkies, hobos and transients we've loved, like Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg sung through the hard-scrabbled sweetness of John Prine. And we know with the Felice Brothers, we know the possibility of American Lore will continue to create new voices such as these. Mark Twain is a perfect reference point, as "Yonder is the Clock" is an old Mark Twain phrase, but as with later Twain, our heroes don't burn as bright as they once did, but they just might have another "Huck Finn" in their canon.

And by the end of the record, we get past the last songs, as their melodies fade from memory, we realize something, that as much as the record turns in the second half, one thing it cannot quite replicate is how these songs don't cut as deep, don't draw the listener in these stories. Maybe it's a noted step back, even though they can still produce the goose bumps-on-your-arm-awe that "Cooperstown" has in spades. To nail such a specific shade, a burnt twist of melancholy, means they are still tapped into the bombed out shacks or trailer parks, the vein of that heavenly American night.

If the last record was the elaborate exposition, then these are the doldrums, things a band might have done if they didn't have such a good time leaning on what it is they do well, which is to trade in a certain kind of nostalgia, music for people too young to have stopped drinking when Tom Waits did, who won't care to spot the influences and will just take it straight up. Which is where future listens will pay off, and there's much to be had here, but compared directly to their previous work "Yonder is the Clock" is an album better know for what could have been rather than a breakout like their last, self-entitled record, "The Felice Brothers." the one my mind will always have room for.