The Handsome Family
Album: Wilderness
Label: Loose
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.handsomefamily.com

The Handsome Family have conjured up their 13th enchanting record, this time with each song dedicated to a different creature. The animal kingdom represents the perfect subject matter for Brett and Rennie Sparks, existing as it does concurrently with human folly, separate but intertwined, closer and more interdependent than we tend to realise. This fits with a band which seems to exist in a parallel universe which transects ours but spins off at glorious tangents carving its own path through space. Wildness, like the album, evokes wonderment, awe, and fear; moments of intense joy and deep sorrow, a sense of our tiny place in a vast, unknowable world.

There has always been a fascinating timelessness to the Handsome Family for me, their work is both profoundly now and ancient. Faeries were not always the whimsical, benign creatures of Victorian fancy; they could be mischievous, capricious and deadly. Fairy tales often had gruesome images and harsh lessons in them, indeed Lizards has echoes of popular tales from Sleeping Beauty to The Red Shoes and the transmogrification of Gulls recalls ancient magicks. Wilderness is not a quantum leap in the Handsome cannon but connoisseurs will appreciate subtle progressions in their unique Americana odyssey. There are brazenly accomplished guitar flourishes, a richness of sound, more use of Rennie's sweet singing accompanying Brett's languorous tones and, as ever, an undercurrent of pitch perfect black humour. Favourites on the album for me so far are Woodpecker, which explores the fate of "Lovely Mary Sweeney, The Famous Window Smasher" in Wisconsin Death Trip (surely the most Handsome of cinematic reference points); Flies which poetically charts the transformation of General Custer's death site across centuries and Frogs, a tender paen to the beauty of mud. However I suspect my allegiances may shift as the songfruits ripen in my head and the shimmers refract when examined more closely.

Rennie's lyrics are as beguiling and wonderful as ever, and the accompanying book containing her artwork and a series of essays is a real treat. The wildness mapped exists on many levels, Rennie weaves a web between worlds that draws together the sciences, poetry, zoology, mythology and her own fantastic cornucopia of imagined realms. Her mind is a magpie, picking the most glittering morsels of truth and crafting an assemblage from them which is both comforting, familiar and yet also strange and threatening. The everyday is transformed; Unheimliche indeed. Truth is not always found in fact of course, and The Handsome Family once again get to the beating, passionate, gristly heart of life, death and the glorious bittersweet messiness in between.

Morag Rose