The Handsome Family @ The Cluny, Newcastle (23.06.08)

Words: Bill Skinner

There’s something about The Handsome Family – or is it The Cluny’s wheat beer? – that I find oddly compulsive to closing my eyes, and then swaying to and fro in a moribund fashion. It’s just as easy to lose yourself in the jauntiness of their noir-Americana, as it is to find yourself revelling in the darkness of a David Lynch film.

Their Americana sound can be as deceiving as Rennie Sparks, one half of the married couple that are The Handsome Family. Between songs she delivers jokey anecdotes and playful slights to her onstage husband. It’s all done in a chirpy fashion and admittedly there must be a bit of knowing kookiness to it all. Nevertheless, it provides such amusement that you sometimes feeling yourself needing to take stock, to remind yourself of the darkness that lies beneath her words. So when she talks of how she tried out several domicile tasks to cheer herself up, such as repainting their house, and growing tomatoes, the inescapable truth is only the latter happened to make her happy – and that was to write a song about taking someone down to the woods and killing them. It may be a punchline, but to The Handsome Family it reads like a manifesto.

The same is very true of their music. As they weave their way through their vast musical canon tonight, it is consistently melodic, jaunty and strangely uplifting, unless of course you pay closer attention to the lyrics and their American-Gothic splendour. Throughout, the lyrics are littered with a sense of the macabre, whether it be murder ballads, hunting songs where the prey turns into the corpse of the protagonist’s lover, or they are scrabbling for self-preservation upon a raft made from human skin and bone.

There are moments of melancholic beauty here such as their classic Weightless Again where the dark harmonies are counterbalanced with a more upbeat accompaniment of fiddle, or in this case melodica.

Brett Sparks has a deeply distinctive baritone delivery, which has the paradoxical quality of sounding both calm and sinister at the same time. When he sings on the chorus of A Bottomless Hole of, well, falling down a bottomless hole, you really believe it is bottomless, and it’s an open invitation to hell. Welcome to the grisly world of the Family Sparks.