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I once lived across the street from the music director of a local radio station. Peeking into his spare bedroom used to give me panic attacks — it was a graveyard for music that was just okay. Hundreds of illegally appropriated US Mail bins filled with CDs and 7" discs slid into one another and spilled their contents all over the floor: Thousands of bands that would never be heard, thousands of haircuts that would never be seen, millions of bar chords lying dormant for all time.
Finding really great new music to listen to is hard — there's just so much STUFF out there, great slush piles of new releases every week. Most of them are just fine: The musicians are competent, the recording engineer did an okay job getting it all on tape, and the lyrics are sung on-key and eloquently reflect the concerns and pleasures of a twenty year old kid who took a few years off before starting college.
So it's no wonder, when I stumble across a band like the Handsome Family, that I go off the rails a bit. I buy everything I can get my hands on, and for the next few weeks, it's the Handsome Family in the car, the Handsome Family in the cheap boom box in the bathroom, three Handsome Family CDs in the three-disc changer in the living room and Handsome Family covers on my iPod as I walk the dogs in the morning.
I've known about the Handsome Family forever — Rennie and Brent Sparks have been putting out home-recorded albums for over a decade — but they didn't take hold of me until a friend included a song from their most recent album on a mix CD. Brent Sparks croons "These Golden Jewels," a demented, surrealist love song highlighted with musical saw and cockeyed banjo:
Shopping carts of garbage
Overturned in silver ponds
In fields of wild mustard
I abandoned several cars
At the edge of town
These golden jewels
I left them all for you
The best Handsome Family songs are dark, fantastical bits of flash fiction. Last Days of Wonder is a twisted storybook filled with first-person accounts of tragic airship crashes, a waltzing biography of Nikolai Tesla, and people going about their mundane routines and slowly realizing that they've passed on to the next life.
photo by Brad Miller
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For those who are unfamiliar with the Handsome Family, their 1998 album Through the Trees is an excellent starting point. Musically, this is my favorite album. Spare, well-crafted songs like "Weightless Again" are achingly beautiful enough to melt even the most vehement country-music haters.
At times, Brent's nasal baritone sounds a bit too much like Garrison Keillor, and some albums are too loaded down with mid-tempo songs, so there's a sameness about them. But almost every song is redeemed by the magical realism of Rennie Sparks' lyrics.
There's a real timelessness to the Handsome Family's music — much of it sounds like it was made on the porch of a dusty country store in Kansas circa 1928, or in the parking lot of a disreputable motor hotel circa 1948, rather than on a laptop in the Sparks' present-day living room.
No one can make a folk song about careening down a bottomless hole or drunkenly staggering around a golf course in grass-stained underwear like the Handsome Family. Love them or hate them, they will never get lost in the slush pile.
Posted October 2006
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anonymous commented, on January 8, 2007 at 11:53 a.m.:
I was searching for Handsome Family tabs/chords when I came across your site. Can't agree with you more about the appeal of this outfit. I have just bought Last Days of Wonder (recommended on my blog too) and it's a lovely listen.
www.hotmilkydrink.typepad.com (my blog)
Kep enjoyingn them and best regards.
Derek