DON'T judge a book by the cover, the clich goes, but it would be wholly sensible to judge The Handsome Family by their song titles.
The Bottomless Hole... Dry Bones... The Song Of A Hundred Toads... this is not the stuff of an S Club singsong.
Instead, on their sixth country noir album in nine years, Brett and Rennie Sparks address matters of fate, fatality and finality with yet more weight and wit. Lugubrious baritone Brett and unsettling songwriter Rennie have relocated from Chicago to put the quirky into Albuquerque, New Mexico, but aside from Rennie removing her glasses, little has changed on the surrealist Handsome canvas. Her intention, in her garage-studio stories of haunted Wal-Marts and whispering shadows in office buildings, is to "rip holes in the veil between this world and the next". Not content with speculating If The World Should End In Fire, the duo later contemplates If The World Should End In Ice. Die the Handsome way and you will die laughing.
Updated: 09:04 Thursday, October 09, 2003
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