Quick Quotes....
Album Of The Week
4 Stars - The Independent
"the Handsomes are making vintage
magic in a world of their own"
4 Stars - The Independent
"Last Days Of Wonder might just be
the duo's finest hour"
5 Stars - The Sun
"an unqualified triumph - Americana
Album Of The Month"
4 Stars - Uncut
"genius"
Mark Radcliffe - Radio 2
"beautifully eerie - a wonderful
album"
Daily Telegraph
"songs of weirdness and wonder, set
in a half wild, half urban, entirely
mysterious place"
4 Stars - The Guardian
"a collection of mini masterpieces"
4 Stars - The Independent On Sunday
"these are engrossing short stories
as much as they are songs and deserve
the attention their stillness demands"
4 Stars - Mail On Sunday
"a strange delight"
4 Stars - The Sunday Times
"they imply the wild things at
civilisation's edge - brilliant!"
4 Stars - Mojo
Read a big article about the band in
Minneapolis's City Pages
Here's a particularly eloquent review from Canada:
http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/columndisplay.php?ART=5441
NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE:
Lyricist Rennie Sparks found inspiration for this album from 1890s
inventor Nicola Tesla whose encounters with electrical power moved him
to retreat from modern life. One line in "Tesla's Hotel Room" suggests
a space where the Handsome Family makes music: "In the last days of
wonder/When spirits still flew/Where we sat holding hands/In
half-darkened rooms."
From this half-darkened room comes Brett Sparks' vintage soundscapes
and Rennie's magical realism, twisted together in tunes that are both
past and present, literary and carnal. Here, people neogtiate the power
of nature and human technologies on earth and in the afterlife.
Old-time music's dark view of human existence fuels the album; life is
imperfect, bones get broken, but people survive. In this world termites
whisper, Tesla nurses sick pigeons, planes crash, and people dance on
golf courses in grass-stained underwear.
The sound is vast as the title, from the eerie but gentle textures of
saw, pedal steel and bowed wine glasses to the surreal patches of
electronic rock and mellotron voices. As always, guitar, banjo, and
Brett's baritone provide the band's old-time acoustic backbone. Their
irresistable musical carnival is as creepy and delicously distinct as
ever.--Katy June-Friesen
Amazon.com
Beginning with an image of cosmic apocalypse and ending with a
cosmic joke about going nowhere (yet always having somewhere else to
be), Brett and Rennie Sparks use their first album in three years, and
their most beautiful and accessible since Through the Trees, to explore
the magical and disturbing intersections between the human, natural,
and spiritual worlds. Recorded at home in Albuquerque, the album
unfolds like a country-folk operetta (mostly composed by Rennie) set in
idyllic and mysterious locales: haunted suburbia, peaceful but slightly
malevolent strip malls, confession-inspiring bowling alleys, and
lovesick airports. When they move to the exotic location of a
shipwrecked island on "After We Shot the Grizzly," they borrow from Bob
Dylan's cryptic "Isis," and make the random, mythic violence their own.
Small moments of ennui, whether feeding pigeons in New York or watching
kids paint graffiti, reveal unpredictable and unsettling dreams, and
the delicate Americana instrumentation only sounds quaint on the
surface. French horns, droning bass notes, clippity-clop drums, pedal
steel (from Stephen Dorocke of Freakwater), and musical saw (from David
Coulter, who has worked with Tom Waits) give even the most macabre
songs--not to mention Brett Sparks' Johnny-Cash-on-Thorazine
vocals--a light, playful air of discovery and wonder. --Roy Kasten
HERE'S A FEATURE STORY ON US
AND OUR NEW RECORD FROM THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY PAGES:
http://citypages.com/databank/27/1335/article14496.asp
"Last Days of Wonder"
By Andy Gill
Published: 26 May 2006, The
Independent, United Kingdom
In the mesmerising 2003 album Singing
Bones, Brett and Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family grappled
with the way that mythic intimations of mortality obtrude into the
everyday - hearing ghosts calling down office corridors and supermarket
aisles, and quietly marking the parallels between the besieged
wagon-trains of pioneer settlers and the plummeting terror of a modern
air disaster.
That continues through parts of Last
Days of Wonder, but with a greater focus on the blunt details of
contemporary life. In "Your Great Journey", the protagonist - the
listener, in the song's unusual second-person narrative - senses he has
"begun to dance the ghost dance" when the world starts ignoring him. As
lift doors close upon him as if he's not there and buses drive past his
stop, he realises he is literally fading from existence. Perhaps he is
the ghostly apparition glimpsed by the tormented narrator of "All the
Time in Airports", doomed to see his lost love everywhere: "I see you
sitting on your suitcase, I see you sleeping in a chair, but each time
I get too close, you always disappear". One is brought up short by the
aptness of the transient location.
Even when no ghosts are there, the ability to invest the mundane with a
spiritual energy is sustained, drawing on traditional folk-tale forms.
In the tragic sea-shanty "After We Shot the Grizzly", the last survivor
of a disaster-strewn expedition floats on a raft, waiting to meet his
love in the afterlife. The fate of the deer stalker in "Hunter Green"
echoes that of the doomed protagonist of some traditional folk song:
confused when the deer he's shot and the fish he's caught both
magically seem to transform into his true love, he holds fire when
confronted with a wild boar and is gored to death.
In The Handsome Family's hands, the most mundane of events can be
imbued with a numinous intensity, as in the recollection of a graveyard
assignation in "White Lights", where banal memories quiver with energy:
"There was mystery singing from everything - the strip mall, the
highway, the boarded-up skating rink". This could serve as the duo's
manifesto. Even songs of more earthbound account, like the
mad-scientist tribute of "Tesla's Hotel Room", are lent added depth and
resonance, as if they too were stations of some peculiar cross,
gestures in a ritual beyond our understanding.
Set to unfussy arrangements of pedal steel, banjo, organ and guitar,
with a few details provided by poignant horns or bowed saw, these songs
are deceptively undemonstrative, returning to American country music
some of its spiritual mystery.
The Handsome Family, Last Days of
Wonder
Sylvie Simmons
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian, United Kingdom
Songs of weirdness and wonder, set in a half wild, half urban, entirely
mysterious place where trees that grow in small squares of dirt hide
man-eating boars. All this will be no surprise to fans of the Americana
duo's last six albums, all home made, this time in their New Mexico
garage, its lo-tech instruments (banjo, steel guitar, Mellotron, bowed
saw) recorded on a Mac. Nothing sums up Brett and Rennie Sparks'
feelings on the flick of a switch separating ancient and modern, dark
and light, nature and civilisation as well as Tesla's Hotel Room, a
dusty country waltz about the invention of electricity.
With less Southern gothic (Bowling Alley Bar is classic country; These
Golden Jewels is like Tom Waits; Somewhere Else To Be is a honky-tonk
weepie) Brett's baritone gets to sound more than sombrely Old
Testament. Rennie's lyrics are thought-provoking, whether on the
urban-rural overlap or why automatic toilets refuse to work.
UNCUT
MAGAZINE, MAY, 2006:
THE ONION AV CLUB
The Handsome Family
Last Days Of Wonder
(Carrot Top)
Reviewed by Christopher Bahn
<http://www.avclub.com/content/author/cbahn>
July 5th, 2006
Dividing the chores is an essential part of any marriage. Albuquerque
duo Brett and Rennie Sparks split the task of songwriting between
Rennie's dark, dreamlike lyrics and Brett's home-produced alt-country
music and deep, resonant baritone. Imagine Edward Gorey writing lyrics
for Johnny Cash. The process has served them well through seven albums,
but rarely has the combination been as rich as on Last Days Of Wonder,
an especially strong showcase of the Sparks' rare combination of whimsy
and morbidity. Last Days' title comes from Puritan witch-hunter Cotton
Mather, who constantly worried about invisible spirits pervading the
world of mortals. Ghosts also haunt Last Days, though not the way
Mather might have imagined. "Your Great Journey" imagines an afterlife
where bodiless souls quietly wander the Earth alone, intangible and
stuck in mundanity: "Automatic sinks in airports no longer see your
hands."
Last Days is shot through with wry, detached scenes of people failing
to connect, or not even realizing there's a connection to be made. The
Sparks wonder about the strangers seen at fast-food drive-though lanes
and in waiting rooms, lives glimpsed for the briefest of moments and
then dismissed, since we all have our own lives to live. It's no
surprise that the album's greatest expression of sympathy is for
eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, whose final days are profiled in the
album's best song, "Tesla's Hotel Room," a sort of gloomy answer to The
Beatles' "Fool On The Hill." Last Days is easily the duo's most
thematically consistent set of songs. The Sparks don't seem
particularly interested in experimenting with new musical styles, but
that isn't a weakness so much as an unswerving fix on what they do
better than anyone else. It isn't likely to attract a new set of fans,
but those receptive to The Handsome Family's spell will listen to Last
Days with wonder.
A.V. Club Rating: A-
COUNTRY STANDARD TIME
http://countrystandardtime.com/cdreviewofweek.html

The Handsome Family
Last Days of Wonder, 2006
Carrot Top
Over the course of their six full length albums, the Handsome
Family's husband/wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks have carved a
niche for themselves as exquisite purveyors of American Gothic folk and
that string remains intact on the pair's seventh album.
Rennie's dark and cryptically obvious short-story lyrics are
still the Handsomes' centerpiece, lovingly spotlit by Brett's eerily
appropriate musical accompaniment. "These Golden Jewels" is Teutonic
bluegrass, like a cross between Tom Waits and R. Crumb, in the service
of a love letter best left unsent ("I drove circles in the meadow,
threw TVs off a cliff/I scattered dirty needles in a grassy ditch..."),
while "After We Shot the Grizzly" tells the tale of a doomed expedition
in gruesome detail ("The captain caught a fever, we tied him to a
tree/We stared into the fire and tried not to hear his screams...")
while lilting along on a gentle Western swing groove. It is that
incredible tension between message and delivery, balancing the feel of
ancient murder ballads and the reality of disaffected contemporary
life, that has distinguished the Handsome Family's work over the past
decade. Brett and Rennie Sparks hone that difference to a razor's edge
here, the best Handsome Family set to date.
- Brian Baker
Terrell's Tune-Up, 06/23/2006 -
Handsome and twisted
Refocused on the family: Brett and
Rennie Sparks
By Steve Terrell | The New Mexican
June 23, 2006
The thing I like best about The Handsome Family is how they create
these deceptively sweet country melodies that invite you to drift along
— but somewhere along the line, the lyrics take unexpected twists and
lead you into strange realms.
A vibrant but alien spirit world will be uncovered, gurgling just below
mundane surfaces. Ancient myths are re-enacted by helpless mortals. Or
sometimes the song turns into a tale in which humans behave bizarrely,
sometimes atrociously.
This holds true with the Albuquerque couple’s latest album, Last Days
of Wonder. Not only is Rennie Sparks’ songwriting as mysterious and
funny as ever, but this album also might just be the group’s strongest
musically. Brett Sparks’ baritone, as always, is the perfect narrative
vehicle for his wife’s lyrics. (I once wrote that he sings like you’d
imagine Abe Lincoln would.) But the instrumentation makes for one
sonically pleasing experience. Most of it is done by Brett, but some is
supplied by members of Albuquerque’s Rivet Gang, which includes Brett’s
brother Darrell Sparks.
The record starts off with a slow, cowboysounding tune called “Your
Great Journey.” This is basically a poetic rewrite of Louis Jordan’s
“Jack, You Dead.”
“When automatic sinks in airports/no longer see your hands/and elevator
doors close on you/when buses drive right past./When the only voice
that answers/is the whir of a ceiling fan/your great journey has
begun.”
There’s “Tesla’s Hotel Room,” a biographical ode to the inventor and
engineer who discovered alternating current and who died impoverished
in 1943. The Wikipedia entry on Nikola Tesla says, “In his later years,
Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist and became noted for making
bizarre claims about possible scientific developments. ... Many of his
achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various
pseudosciences, UFO theories, and New Age occultism.”
But The Handsome Family is kinder, calling Tesla’s final days “the last
days of wonder/when spirits still flew round bubbling test tubes in
half-darkened rooms.” They show Tesla eating only saltines, nursing
sick pigeons, and “dreaming of God as an X-ray machine.”
There’s “Flapping Your Broken Wings,” a song that, as Brett told me in
an interview last year, is about “golf course vandalism.” The first
line is a classic: “I can still see you there/in your grass-stained
underwear/Dancing crooked circles across the golf course green.” It’s a
happy tune about a drunken couple trespassing on a golf course at 3
a.m. just for a crazy frolic.
By the last verse, consequences portend: “Like jewels on your green
dress, my lady of the golf course/running in your underwear to greet
the cops who’d driven up.” (I don’t think this song is
autobiographical, but the Sparkses do live near a nine-hole golf
course.)
Probably the prettiest song here is “Beautiful William,” where Brett’s
guitar is accompanied by ghostly synths. It’s about a man who
mysteriously disappears: “Was he given a package by a man on a
train?/We found his car by the roadside later that day.” But even more
mysterious is the reaction of William’s friends. “Rose smashed his
windows till the glass/was all gone. Polly broke the back door/and she
screamed down the hall./But no answer sounded but the wind
flying/through as we tore up the green lawn/and torched all the rooms.”
“Hunter Green,” one of the rare songs on which Rennie sings lead,
alludes to Celtic mythology and William Butler Yeats. A hunter kills a
deer that turns into “my true love ... in a dress of darkest green” and
then reverts back into a deer.
My favorite here is “After We Shot the Grizzly,” a breezy little tune
with dark lyrics about castaways. But this ain’t Gilligan’s Island. “We
built a raft from skin and bones./Only five could safely float. The
others stood/upon the shore. They screamed and threw sharp stones ...”
Whether they’re singing of legendary seas, sad little forgotten
graveyards, bowling alleys, golf courses, airports, or drive-in
restaurants, The Handsome Family leads their listeners to magic. Are
these not still the days of wonder? (www.handsomefamily.com)