The Handsome Family
The 12 Bar Club, London
Before a note’s been sung or a chord struck, Rennie Sparks has invited the audience back to her shoebox-sized dressing room for shrimp cocktails. As the show progresses, she relays surreal details of her squirrel-infested nightmares, dispenses wisdom from her mother (“when she heard this one, she said, ‘Somebody needs an anti-depressant’”), makes suggestive but derisory allusions to the sex life she shares with her husband and musical partner Brett, and worries that the crowd packed in front of the small stage may be flesh-eating zombies.
“There’s not enough food in here for all of us. We could kill all the people with glasses,” she says, looking meaningfully at the bespectacled Brett. A former Texan Baptist and a New York jewess, the Handsomes come on like a unique opposites-attract attraction at an end-of-the-century Medicine show. Rennie’s revenge-of-the-catskills comedienne skits and Bretts gruff rejoinders act as counterparts to their lovingly etched beautifully wounded and spirit-soaring missives blending the myths of the American past with the dark truths and horrors of its present.
This is their fourth visit to the UK this year – promoting Down in The Valley, a collection that rounds up their career so far, and giving us a taster of In the Air, the follow up to Uncuts’ country album of 1998, Through the Trees. The levity and engaging banter drew the audience in, but it’s the stark music, moulded with primitive precision, that holds us. Mini-disc backing tracks, melodica, bass, Brett’s gnarled and pellucid guitar and the autoharp which Rennie cradles like a sick child provide the lure of Brett’s parched but steely interpretations of his wife’s twisted yet visionary lyrics.
Songs like ‘Cathedrals’, ‘Weightless Again’ and ‘The Giant Of Illinois’ fire the imagination, leave us enraptured and stalled in our skins by their ability to create and destroy worlds of doom and wonder. The duo’s continued delicate apprehension of tragedy and tender appraisal of mundane epiphanies were heightened on such stand-out new songs as ‘A Beautiful Thing’ and the afterlife anticipation of ‘Grandmother Waits For You’. The Handsome Family – as funny as fuck, as sweet as love, and as serious as death – variety entertainment at its finest.
Gavin Martin.
AGAIN FROM UNCUT MAGAZINE