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A fruit plate isn't the first thing you'd associate with the Handsome Family. Death? Yes. Decay? Sure. Overturned shopping carts? Why not? But it's a fruit plate that Brett Sparks carries on stage, offering it to the crowd before realizing there's only enough for him to eat.
It's these tiny interactions that make husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks (aka the Handsome Family) so endearing. They're a Johnny and June for the download generation -- a seemingly sober Rennie (she's drinking Diet Coke) keeps Brett, who downs three bottles of beer during the set, in check. But it's Brett who counts off all the songs, songs that are full of suicide, airport sinks, and sad milkmen. They're songs, like the great Appalachian folk tales of yore, with tales of woe, hope, beauty, liquor, and everyday life.
In an age where country music has become a commodity much like milk -- pasteurized and sterile -- the Handsome Family are a welcome respite from the factory flavor. Their recent album, Last Days of Wonder, is an assault on the commercialized soul-pop-country pap circumnavigating the charts, a rich record throbbing with the hum of humanity. This rootsy revival is a surprising one, especially when you realize that it was recorded, not on analog tape or alone in a mountain shack, but on a Mac. Herein lies the juxtaposition makes the Handsome Family what they are: they're just as at home listening to Rubber Soul as they would be Harry Smith's six-disc folk anthology. In fact, a reading of The Complete Beatles Recording Session provided inspiration for the band's new album, which Brett recorded at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In essence, then, the Handsome Family are "country" in the same way that the Velvet Underground were pop: their place within the genre is at once elemental and experimental, easy-going and ethereal, dark and disturbing.
Since forming in Chicago in the early '90s, the group has released eight albums and toured relentlessly, mainly as a two-piece. On this tour, however, they're joined by drummer Jason Toth and multi-instrumentalist Stephen Dorocke, who provide intricate interplay on slower songs and a backdrop of sound on others.
Live, "My Sister's Tiny Hands" cascades like a champagne fountain, crystal clear. "Weightless Again" loses its air-organ intro, but not its appeal. "Bottomless Hole", from 2003's Singing Bones, is turned into a rollicking, rocking romp as Brett enunciates his lyrics like they're stuck in his teeth; he spits them out like shrapnel. Other times, his words drop like rotten apples from a tree -- part country crooner, part Mark E. Smith.
Though he has a beautiful baritone so low you could run a river through it and call it a valley, Brett steps aside on a couple of occasions to let Rennie take the reins. Looking like a gothic catholic schoolgirl -- plaid skirt, dark hair, and darker humor -- she takes the lead on "Hunter Green" and "Down, Down, Down." Her renditions sound like Patsy Cline being covered by Joanna Newsom at a renaissance fair. Rennie also provides in-between song banter. Her comic fodder seems right at home in the World Café, which with its tables and chairs, low lights, and candles, is more akin to a comedy club than a music venue.
This doesn't distract from the songs, of course, which they pull from every album but 1996's Milk and Scissors. "Arlene", from their debut, Odessa, gets an airing, the taut tale of a woman being bludgeoned to death. "Up Falling Rock Hill" from 2000's In the Air is as country as it gets -- a fiddle intro falls away leaving Brett, cutting a bear-like figure on stage with a graying goatee and jaws that look like they're detaching at the joint when he sings, to state, matter-of-factly:
Up Falling Rock Hill where the leaves look like bats
I shot my brother William five times in the back.
"Have mercy, have mercy dear brother," he cried
but the wind has no mercy and neither did I.
They finish, fittingly, with "So Long", a paean to dead pets, before returning for a two-song encore, fruit plate in hand. Launching into song, Brett wishes out loud for a napkin. You see, the Rolling Stones aren't the only band to take country music to the masses and come back with sticky fingers.
— 8 August 2006
