"There was mystery singing from everything," says Brett Sparks on "White Lights". It's a tender love song from the Handsome Family's seventh studio album, Last Days of Wonder, that's set, characteristically enough, within a graveyard beside a stripmall-- a theme and place that should be recognizable to anyone familiar with the Handsome Family and their fractured, gothic Americana. The husband/wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks have always sought to wrest as much mystery and romance as possible from their seemingly mundane modern surroundings, crafting an impressive, finely attuned catalog of urban ghost stories, death ballads, and fatalistic country narratives.
Steeped in Appalachian folk tradition, the Handsome Family's songs are forever shadowed by nature's hidden uncontrollable forces. Perhaps it's this deep-seated sense of impending doom that has lately discouraged the duo from making any far-reaching updates to their musical attack. Last Days of Wonder is the Handsome Family's first album since 2003's Singing Bones, and like the rest of their work its success depends entirely upon two assets: Rennie's keenly observed, fantasist lyrics and Brett's rich, oaken baritone. With a formula the duo settled upon somewhere around 1998's Through the Trees, Brett supplies nearly all of the music as well, digitally recording layers of guitar, banjo, autoharp, and electronic percussion. But while Last Days of Wonder does contain some typically absorbing performances, one can't help but feel that they've begun to repeat themselves, sounding at times like some talkative old-timer who can't always recall which of his crazy stories he's already told.
On earlier albums Through the Trees or 1996's Milk and Scissors, Rennie's lyrics revealed an exacting detail that helped to illuminate the duo's physical and personal geography. Songs like "Lake Geneva" and "The Woman Downstairs" were not only richly evocative of the duo's then-homebase Chicago, but also featured a fervent, diary-like intimacy that packed a powerful emotional wallop. Since that time the Sparks have relocated to Albuquerque, and subsequent albums have seen a gradual reduction in their lyrics' descriptive detail. Nearly all of the action on Last Days of Wonder takes place within the stale anonymity of airports, hotels, and interstates. Perhaps this is intended as a comment on the sterility of our soulless modern environments, but these impersonal settings lend the album an air of emotional detachment that makes it difficult to embrace. Likewise, songs like "Beautiful William"-- in which a man inexplicably vanishes one day, leaving behind his beautiful home and perfect lawn-- are populated only by the sort of vague, unsubstantiated characters one might expect to find in any generic urban legend.
One trait that all Handsome Family albums share, however, is that they each contain two or three centerpiece songs that seem to have received special attention. One such example on Last Days of Wonder is "Tesla's Hotel Room", a brilliant track that lovingly depicts the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla nursing sick pigeons, dividing his time equally between science and spirituality. "After We Shot the Grizzly" matches Rennie's deadpan survival tale ("We shot and ate the horses... I found a human skull") to a swanky Chet Atkins-style countrypolitan groove, while the pro-environment "Our Blue Sky" deftly skewers the Christian Right ("Would you love God if he didn't love you/ More than rivers, snakes or wind?") over a sunny California jangle.
Rennie takes the lead on the lush, cello-driven "Hunter Green", delivering what is by far her most appealing vocal on record. Yet too often on Last Days of Wonder the Handsome Family settle readily into their standard roles and midtempo, clip-clop rhythms. Consequently tracks like "Flapping Your Broken Wings" or "Bowling Alley Bar" can feel rote, sounding like less-inspired versions of the duo's earlier material. On the amusing finale "Somewhere Else to Be," Brett relays a wry tale of love lost due to a moment's inattention at drive-thru window, closing out an uneven album that unfortunately contains several such missed opportunities.
