Brett Sparks is one somber fella. Or at least that’s the impression one gets from listening to The Handsome Family, the Americana band helmed by Sparks and his wife, Rennie Sparks. He may be a barrel of laughs in person, but on record he is always deadpan, never ebullient or excited or joyous.
And it works, because his devoid-of-passion vocals just happen to be the perfect vehicle for the weird and wonderful stories conjured up by his spouse, who writes the lyrics while he writes the music. Even when those stories are funny—as in the case of “Tin Foil,” which includes some hilarious lines (which are supposedly true) about how Liza Minnelli spent two months in bed because she was afraid a disintegrating Skylab would fall from space on her head—he sings them in that crisp and sober voice of his, and what you come away with is a case of the melancholies, but the good melancholies, the kind that let you know that life is hard but at least you’re still above ground.
The Handsome Family have enough great songs on the 10 or so studio LPs they’ve recorded since 1993 to fill the sinkhole behind the barn that a mesmerized farmer lowers himself into in an old clawfoot bathtub in their American Gothic classic, “The Bottomless Pit.” It was one of the first songs I ever heard by the alt-country band, and I was immediately smitten. Then I heard “Amelia Earhart vs. the Dancing Bear,” and wham! I was in love. It’s rare to come across a song written with the craft and eye to detail of a good short story, and those two songs rank—as do others Rennie Sparks has written—alongside such great story-telling songs as American Music Club’s “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” Mountain Goats’ “Against Pollution,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman.” Oh, and let’s not forget Killdozer’s “Hamburger Martyr.”
I don’t know what else to say about the Handsome Family, except that Brett Sparks’ music is often just as somber as his voice, the band was formed in Chicago but now calls Albuquerque, New Mexico home, and Brett sings and plays a variety of instruments while Rennie sings and plays bass and banjo. They tend towards country musically, but Brett plays a mean guitar that is totally rock, and, oh yeah, their profile got a big boost not so long ago when T. Bone Barnett, the musical direction for HBO’s True Directive, chose their “Far From Any Road” as the crime drama’s main title theme.
Milk and Scissors was the band’s sophomore LP, and released in 1996. It marked the shift between the Handsome Family’s often hard-rocking 1994 debut and the purer (in relative turns) country sound they’ve been pursuing since. In short, it rocks out less than 1994’s Odessa, but more than the albums that have followed it.
Opener “Lake Geneva” is a classic country song with lyrics that defy easy explication; it’s a song about madness and camping out, with its references to “seeing visions of the heavens in the stumps of fallen trees” while “raccoons in the darkness drag off your hot dog buns,” and comes complete with a wonderful lap steel guitar solo by Brett Sparks. It ends with a frighteningly accurate description of a person in the throes of mania: “And you remember how he cried when they strapped him to the stretcher/Convinced his arms were burning with electricity from heaven/You remember how he told you that black holes were like Jesus/And the crucifix was a battery that filled the air with fire.” As for “Winnebago Skeletons,” it’s all feedback and drum bash, with Brett Sparks dishing out a big Neil Young School guitar solo while singing about a fish in his stomach a thousand years old and a “big-antlered deer stepping into the road/A beautiful woman with her head in the stove/The skyscrapers crumble heavy with rats/The wind’s full of beer cans and wiffle ball bats.” As with “Lake Geneva,” this one is more poetry than short story, and in the end offers no resolution, but just a lingering sense of mystery.
“Drunk by Noon” is a slow-driving and melodic rocker that opens with the great line, “There once was a poodle who thought he was a cowboy” and only gets weirder from there, what with both Sparks singing, “Sometimes I burn my arms with cigarettes/Just to pretend I won’t scream when I die/Sometimes I can’t wait to come down with cancer/At least then I’ll get to watch TV all day.” The song’s bottom line? “If my life was as long as the moon’s/I’d still be jealous of the sun/If my life lasted only one day/I’d still be drunk by noon.” Oh, and it comes complete with a cool whistling solo. The traditional folk song, “The House Carpenter,” which the Sparks adapted from Clarence Ashley’s 1930 recording, is a jaunty number that features the couple swapping lines on some occasions and singing together on others, and it’s truly a mystery how Rennie Sparks, who was born in Long Island, manages to sound every bit as holler-born as the wife of one of those lethal rustics in Deliverance. The song tells the story of a man who returns from the sea to discover his love has married and had children with a house carpenter, and has one very unhappy ending, which I won’t reveal. They tell it better than I could.
“The Dutch Boy” is a plodding number, and retells the familiar story of the boy who stuck his thumb in the dike and prevented a great flood. Only in this rendering the boy’s act of heroism seems to sour his existence, and he takes to his bed with a bottle of rum, having come to the realization that “the waters must rise again/ Because the world is made up of milk and scissors/Milk and scissors in a spiraling chain/Milk and scissors like a cheap squirting flower/Milk and scissors like worms when it rains.” It’s not my favorite track on the LP, and I listen to it chiefly for Brett Sparks’ fractured and echoing guitar solo, as well as for the percussion-heavy instrumental of an ending. “The King Who Wouldn’t Smile” is a driving romp featuring some great chug-a-lugging drumming by Mike Werner, and mines the same vein as the song before it, namely inexplicable unhappiness. But this one’s pure tragicomedy from its opening lines: “There was a King who wouldn’t smile/Sat on the toilet reading The Trial.” All he does is cry and cry; “He cried so much that herds of deer/Gathered to lick his salty tears/So the king crawled under his bed.” The rollicking melody and over-the-top lyrics would seem to make it impossible to take the King’s wretchedness seriously, but somehow you still do, if only just a little bit.
“Emily Shore 1819-1839” tells the true story of Emily Shore, the Anne Frank of consumption, who kept a diary of her final years, and its sad, sad, sad. Brett Sparks’ lugubrious vocals are spot on, and Rennie Sparks’ moving lyrics are remarkable in their depth of detail: “She’d laughed at the graveyard on one sip of wine and kept a pet duck till the cat crushed its spine” goes one line, “By Spring there’d be picnics and merry-go-rounds, but she’d be nothing but bones in the ground” another. As for the indie rocker “3-Legged Dog,” it sticks out like a three-legged dog on Milk and Scissors. Brett’s voice sounds different, more city than country, and he compares a drunk to a three-legged dog who “can’t walk fast or fuck, but you still get in heat/You can’t wag your ears or flap your tail, but I still see you wandering down by the wishing well.” Throw in some nifty backing vocals, some more excellent drumming by Werner, and the song’s driving beat which culminates in the hard-rocking instrumental that ends the song, and what you’ve got is a song that proves the Handsome Family could have taken a left turn away from country instead of the right turn they took towards it, and still have been a great band.
That said, follow-up “#1 Country Song,” demonstrates that they took the wiser course. It’s straight ahead country, all heartbreak and tears, and it would sound great on a honky-tonk jukebox. The title is a joke (a Handsome Family song at the top of the country charts, right) but is also dead serious, at least to the extent that it in a just and rational world it would have topped the country charts, what with Brett Sparks singing about how he wishes his “foolish heart could go for somebody new, but I just can’t stop loving you.”
As for “Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear,” where do I start? It’s one of the most richly detailed and moving songs I’ve ever heard. An imaginative recreation of the final seconds of Amelia Earhart’s life, and the memories of childhood that coursed through her mind as her plane hit the trees and exploded, “Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear” is more rocker than country tune, and features a propulsive rhythm and some great guitar. But what really makes it work are Rennie’s lyrics: “She remembered sipping consommé with William Howard Taft/And a boy with perfect skin who smelled like mustard gas/And as the cockpit burned, she couldn’t help but smile/Recalling a dancing bear she’d seen as a child.” Seriously, those lines give me the shivers, and the bit about the boy with perfect skin who smelled like mustard gas is sheer genius, and it doesn’t surprise me a bit that the Handsome Family titled a song after a short story (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”) by the great Flannery O’Connor, because Rennie Sparks is working in the same Southern Gothic tradition as O’Connor and I suspect she learned a trick or two by reading her.
“Tin Foil” is pure kuntry and funny in its inimitable way, what with the aforementioned lines about Liza “Give Me All the Drugs You’ve Got” Minnelli’s pathological fear of the falling Skylab, but it’s a deadly serious song too, with its dark and inscrutable chorus about death (“What is moving will be still/What’s been gathered will disperse/What’s been built up will collapse/All your dreams fulfilled”) and a verse that goes, “One night I dreamed that I dug my own grave/And climbed down inside to patiently wait.” And it brings the album full circle, with its title that screams madness (everybody knows crazy people wear tin foil hats) connecting it to the mental illness of “Lake Geneva.” And if I talk about “Tin Foil” as the last song on Milk and Scissors it’s only because the tune that follows it, Mike Werner’s “Puddin’ Fingers,” is a short instrumental long on the twang, and a sort of country-rockabilly hybrid that includes a bleating sax, some really odd drumming, and a erratically pulsating rhythm that says “Let’s dance” but makes it almost impossible to do so.
The Handsome Family found itself at a crossroads in 1996, with a paved highway leading to indie rock and a dusty, twin-rutted dirt track leading to country. They chose the latter road, but on Milk and Scissors you still get a little of both, which is what makes its title so apt. Rennie and Brett Sparks have been working a twisted vein of alt-country for two decades now, and they’ve panned enough musical gold to make us all rich. Listening to their albums is a lot like being that obsessed farmer lowering himself into that bottomless sinkhole out yonder behind the red barn. It may get dark, and it may get cold. But you never know what wonders you’ll behold.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
