Sam Perduta / Special to The Recorder

The New York-based Felice Brothers have truly evoked that “old, weird America” with their newest release, Yonder Is The Clock: that place Bob Dylan and The Band took us with The Basement Tapes, where you can get your meals for free or for a song, where the wheel’s on fire and about to explode, and where the clouds are swift and the rain just won’t lift.

It’s an untouchable piece of Americana that can be placed in any time, any place.

The album itself is named after a chapter in a posthumously released incomplete Mark Twain novel, The Mysterious Stranger, which is a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of organized religion and the so-called “morality” that binds religion.

The Felice Brothers display that pessimism throughout Yonder Is The Clock, with songs about dying in Penn Station, being thrown into the sea wrapped in chicken wire, and dreaming about being buried in ice.

Just about every track can be traced to modern times in America, especially the standout “Boy From Lawrence County,” which questions the morals of Robert Ford as he sets out to betray his friend Jesse James.

The songs are drenched with accordian, honky tonk piano, fiddle, organ and the whisky- and cigarette-torn voice of Ian Felice, and capture so well the essence of that unattainable slice of Americana that we can only dream of now.

Yonder Is The Clock is so refreshing in the days of digital music, as it’s an album that could have been recorded in 1967 in rural upstate New York. There’s an archaic feeling to the songs, which strangely make them more relevant and purely listenable than anything else released this year.