These are interesting times, so you'd expect that it'd be easy to find interesting music, too. If only it were that simple. Bands capable of carving out their own creative niche are either extremely rare or extremely elusive, and in a world where traditional values are juxtaposed against crass commercialization and challenged by advanced technologies, you'd expect to find plenty of cracks in the façade to exploit. The Handsome Family doesn't seem to have any problems locating them, which leads me to believe that they either have an extremely keen sense of the ironies lurking behind our modern lifestyles and value systems, or that most other bands just don't care to create intelligent music. I tend to believe the former.
Brett and Rennie Sparks play on the kitsch of a beer commercial-- round 'em up, Americana sentimentality that serves as a base for the exquisitely skewed ruminations that flow from Rennie's pen. Tales of suicide, murder and madness float lazily over programmed Casio keyboard country-and-western rhythms. It has the feel of a truck stop karaoke bar, or a "Prairie Home Companion" broadcast from an old folks' home somewhere in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. The lyrics, though, are something altogether different.
The Handsomes usually concentrate on fashioning a mythological tableau of ordinary and forsaken characters, emphasizing the dark and brutal side of life in a way that recalls some of Nick Cave's work, but tempering it with a touch of humor that makes it all very unthreatening. Twilight also succeeds where their previous album, In the Air, often failed, by crafting a set of slowly evolving tracks that act as perfect vehicles for the duo's brand of story telling. Brett's delivery is slow and lumbersome, and soon enough, you find yourself easily wrapped into the tales these two tell.
Twilight starts off in typical Handsome Family fashion with "The Snow White Diner," the story of a woman who kills herself and her two children by driving into a frozen river, the singer watching the rescue crew and the gathering crowd from a diner as he eats his hash browns. Death is present, too, represented by two old women sitting nearby, eating liver and onions (and my mother always tried to convince me liver was good for me). You quickly get the idea with the Handsome Family that, despite the initial impression, you're not listening to "Tumbling Tumbleweeds."
"Passenger Pigeons" is a beautiful, heart-breaking chronicle of grief that has to be one of the strongest songs I've heard all year. Rennie displays a lyrical gift I've found in very few songwriters and the artful economy of the words she uses here really disgusts me when I think of the millions Bernie Taupin's accumulated shoveling schlock while these two find themselves largely unrecognized (although I get a strange feeling they prefer it that way).
And of course, there are other fantastic songs on the album, too. "A Dark Eye" and "Peace in the Valley Once Again" are imaginative ventures into the past and future that create a romantic idealization of nature that reminds me of some of Neil Young's more imaginative tracks on Rust Never Sleeps. "A Dark Eye" is an Appalachian fantasy that takes you through the singer's thoughts as he sits in his car in a parking lot: "In that parking lot where a prairie once grew/ And through the tall grass the buffalo flew/ I heard something crying way down below/ Where sewer lines snake around Indian bones." "Peace in the Valley," meanwhile, writes the epitaph of urban sprawl in a visionary account of the disintegration of a shopping mall and western civilization: "All the mirrors cracked in half when wild horses galloped past/ And morning doves built their nests on the escalator steps/ And there was peace in the valley once again." "Gravity" is the mystical story of the fantasies of a mad blind man whose potatoes speak to him. "The White Dog" is a delusional account of nightmarish fear and paranoia. Do you see a theme here?
There are some throwaway tracks on the album that I feel totally indifferent towards, and most of them are backed by Rennie's keyboard playing which at times leans toward campy. But you've got to understand the Handsome Family. Few other bands could give such a sympathetic catalog of deceased childhood pets as "So Long": "So long to my dog Snickers who ate Christmas tinsel/ So long to Mr. Whiskers who jumped out of a window/ And to the family of gerbils who chewed out of their cage/ And to the little brown rabbit I ran over by mistake/ So long, so long, I'll see you on the other side."
