Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Family Matters, 2 April 2009
The Handsome Family's (aka Brett & Rennie Sparks) eighth album `Honey Moon' is a collection of love songs "featuring tales of intimate insects and lovers kissing in wet caves", released to mark their 20th wedding anniversary. Maintaining the gothic Americana Family template of previous albums, `Honey Moon' blends the baroque with spectral, old-time country atmospherics and shades of bluegrass and ragtime. The cinematic gloominess and image-rich romanticism make The Handsome Family as much an heir to Nick Cave's `Murder Ballads' as to the current crop of alt-country/folk revivalists, but the banjo and steel guitar keep this sonically rooted in US music traditions.
"I am the puddles in the street waiting for your falling leaves. Wind your vines around me, drop your branches in my path", croons Brett Sparks with his chesty baritone on opener `Linger, Let Me Linger', a baroque, cello-led waltz. His rendering of images ("Hearts drawn on a dusty window pane / A love note lying in the road / a car circling round a darkened street / a woman crying on the phone") could have been taken at random from a collection of William Eggleston photographs. Not so much tongue-in-cheek as slightly flat footed in its insistence in imbuing the everyday with a poetic charge, it's nevertheless beguiling, sensual stuff, with some lovely low-end guitar work. Texturally `Little Sparrows' is a real contrast, replacing the autumnal strings of the opener with jaunty country: all noodly steel-pedal twang, scorched asphalt and chrome. Listen carefully, though, and you will hear Brett imagining himself as Jonah, giving himself up to the whale, alongside ruminations on "paper cups blowing down the street" and "ants winding through the tangled weeds". And concerning the Little Sparrows of the title, Brett asks: "Where you're going I don't care, take me with you when you go", a statement so trite it's hard not to think it ironic.
Brett's singing varies from the posturing, more histrionic strains of the opener and the bizarrely-worded `The Loneliness of Magnets' to more understated country standards like `Wild Wood' - but is best when, as on `My Friend', he deliberately fails to hit the high notes with a Kurt Wagner-esque pathos. In fact a number of tracks recall Lambchop, even if `Honey Moon' sounds a little deliberate in comparison to the subtler charms of, say, `Nixon`. Few of Honey Moon's tracks last longer than three minutes, but the thoughtful arrangements and enchanted ambience gives it substance, even if lyrically the album is often daydreamy and somewhat inconsequential. Admittedly, the theme gets a little thin over Honey Moon's course, and sometimes I found myself wishing Mr & Mrs Sparks would allow the music to expand and evolve, rather than limiting it to the duration of the song-cycle.
There are hints of David Lynch's American underworld sewn into the mix, for instance the noirish surf guitar of `A Thousand Diamond Rings' and `The Winding Corn Maze' recall both Angelo Badalamente and Chris Isaak's melancholic reimagining of early rock and roll. Curious studio trickery abounds: the weirdly shuffling `Love is Like' has a hint of Animal Collective's out of box thinking about it, the wonky organs and glockenspiel sound as if they are crackling out of a short-wave radio set. `The Petrofied Forrest' - one of the album's stand out tracks - marries natural imagery to a more tangible, albeit conventional, sense of loss. "Raindrops and Roses fell from the Heavens" he begins, rather over-egging the drama, before bringing it a little closer to earth: "When you left me alone, the sky turned to stone ... why did you go?" When revisiting diner and tumbleweed old-time country, it feels exactly that: revisited, abstracted by nostalgia, cinematic and occasionally a little contrived; for instance the somnambulant bluegrass of `When you Whispered' and `The Loneliness of Magnets', with its whistling and high-end mandolin playing.
There is so much to enjoy in the dreamy detachment of the music that the myth-making in the lyrics comes across as a bit clumsy and superfluous. Thus `Honey Moon', while very accomplished and often beautiful, sometimes seems the work of a band who are trying a little too hard to create a certain impression and in the process unneccesarily rendering their music a bit oblique or impersonal. However, fans of Smog, Nick Cave and Lambchop, or recent albums by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, James Jackson Toth and Micah P Hinson's `Red Empire Orchestra` will find plenty to enjoy here. First published at Altsounds.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Slightly Askew but True View, 5 Jun 2009
Brett and Rennie Sparks are a couple of genius song writers; lately out of Albuquergue by way of Texas, New York and Chicago. Unfortunately the obvious name 'Sparks' was already taken by the 80's electro-pop duo so they became the Handsome Family. It's not quite accurate to say that they are under rated, because just about everyone who comes across them rates them very highly, just criminally overlooked. I won't be around in 100 years, but I bet their songs will be. I don't have any Grandchildren yet but when I do, I'm going to tell them to ask their kids to check it out for me. Think of that curio from your maiden aunt that you've always liked but never-the-less is gathering a bit of dust on that top shelf and then you take it down to get evaluated at Antiques Roadshow and you discover it is a Rodin maquette. You know the feeling. That's the Handsome Family. Enter their world; a bit different but a focused, colourful lens to view ours. Their new disc continues the tradition they have established of building a wonderful new world - story by story, song by song. They built this city on American Gothic Alt-Country. And they are very funny, too.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gothic romance, 18 May 2009
Another marvellous album from the Handsome family, as full as ever of the bizarre imagery that is so distinctive set in beautifully played alt-country arrangements. This time out the accent is on romance, but if you're after the usual moon-in-June plattitudes, look elsewhere. Instead we have a series of gothic tales written by Rennie Sparks that are either disturbing or touching depending on your viewpoint. Probably the most immediate track is Wild Wood, a caveman romance with wolves roaming outside the cave. Brett Sparks' music is inventive and varied and always complements the lyrics brilliantly.
As another reviewer remarked recently - "still in a field of one".
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
~ The Felice Brothers
~ Handsome Family
~ Handsome Family
~ Bill Callahan
~ The Broken Family Band
