An addition to our Anniversary Cheers occasional Feature: this is The Handsome Family with a re-release, with additional outtakes and live recordings, of the excellent Singing Bones.
The Handsome Family are Brett and Rennie Sparks, a husband-and-wife team that has recorded and released more than a dozen albums over a 30-year period. Sometime after they married in 1989, Brett suggested to Rennie, then a fashion designer, that she write lyrics to his music. And so began the creation of a body of work that exemplifies the americana genre, with Rennie’s surreal, unexpected and ghostly lyrics, Brett’s deep baritone voice. and their lovely harmonies. Their debut, Odessa, in 1995, established her songwriting credentials on an album that was more indie rock than subsequent releases; then on to even darker material, generally becoming known as Western Gothic. Their third album, Through The Trees (1998), was their breakthrough, a highly regarded album that followed almost directly from Brett’s hospitalisation with mental health issues and subsequent diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. A move from Chicago to Albuquerque in 2001 changed the perspective of their songs to desert landscapes and wide-open spaces, but retained Rennie’s surreal dreamscapes and vivid storytelling. The album that subsequently brought them to the attention of the listening public in greater numbers was Singing Bones, released in 2003 to great critical acclaim at the time but much more generally popular from 2014, when the western-sounding song Far From Any Road became the theme tune for the first series of ‘True Detective’.
Now, with full remastering, a first-ever vinyl pressing, new packaging, and a cache of demos and live recordings, the album gets the expanded reissue it deserves.
So, does it live up to its historical acclaim? The sound is really good, and the atmosphere generated is of large expansive desert landscapes, with cool cinematic effects (a haunting saw on 24 Hour Store, Spanish guitar effects from Brett on the beautiful Western-sounding Gail With The Golden Hair, with its overtones of Randy Sharp’s brilliant Dreams of the San Joaquin), and the songs are still rather noir, with stories of death and destruction (murder, suicide), ghostly apparitions and general madness. Rennie delivers dark (occasionally humorous) lyrics to Brett’s melodic, often counterintuitive tunes.
The opener The Forgotten Lake sets the tone for the album, with images of covered wagons and wings of missing planes, and the ghostly “Golden flash at the corner of your eye / Though shadows that climb your darkened walls at night / They open a door lit with forgotten light”. In 24 Hour Store “Ghosts fly up the aisles,” and in A Shadow Underneath, “all the little shadows danced around her feet, and she wanted to see them, but didn’t want to see.”
Mortality is a persistent theme, often metaphorically, as in the crossing over into the afterlife. The Bottomless Hole is a perfect example: a darkly comedic song of the man who climbs into a pit, believed to be bottomless since the rubbish he has thrown into it never seems to hit bottom, then cuts himself loose and disappears: “I cut loose from the ropes /And fell on down that hole / And still I’m there falling / Down in this evil pit / But until I hit the bottom /I won’t believe it’s bottomless” The Song of a Hundred Toads tells the story of a gold prospector who drives his animals too hard and they abandon him to the afterlife, welcomed by said toads.
A highlight is the bleak Fallen Peaches – a soldier sees his comrade shot to death and foresees his own to follow “Across the corpses on the hills / The sunset spread her flames / And her glowing fingers held me / As they dug my shallow grave. The haunting Whitehaven tells the eerie story of “The darkest of beauties with her basket of cherries / The wind at her black skirt like the hands of the wild dark wood / She turned in her terror, a madness possessed her”, and it showcases the lovely harmonies of the Sparks (overtones of Simon and Garfunkel, quite removed from her earlier gruffer voice.
The two-part a cappella, If The World Should End in Fire and If The World Should End in Ice, at the midpoint in the album and at its end, is a premonition of the eschaton with Brett’s voice multi-tracked towards the uncomfortable climax. While Brett manages much of the instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and musical saw), and Rennie adds her musical talent to a few of the tracks (vocals, bass, autoharp and banjo) and there are some excellent contributions from special guests; Dave Gutierrez on mandolin and steel, Darrell Sparks adds violin banjo and drums while Greg Hanson’s dobro lights up Dry Bones.
The added extras offer a fascinating insight into the mutation from demo into recorded article, and the live versions offer different perspectives on the songs, but the embellishments on the album recordings add a different dimension (musical saw, echoing vocals, steel guitar) and convert the songs from folksy songs to eerie ghostliness and cinematic soundscapes. Far from any Road, live in San Diego, is the best of the live additions, with its atmospheric percussion. But that takes nothing away from the splendour and spookiness of the recorded album, sounding fine in remastered versions, and I am delighted that this has ascended within my radar. A worthy re-release.
