Greil Marcus's "Real Life Top Ten" from Salon.com,

8) Handsome Family, "Live at Schuba's Tavern" (DCN) <http://www.dcn.com>
On this December night in Chicago last year, Brett and Rennie Sparks' Gothic
songs -- which owe as much to Emily Dickinson as to "The Wagoner's Lad," as
much to "Apache" as to Edgar Allen Poe -- take on a new drama. The sense of
an alcoholic Shakespearean actor reciting "King Lear" for an underattended
tent show audience in a Colorado mining town somewhere around 1880, always
present in Handsome Family music, is heightened. With unexpected deep
breaths, with a deepened voice, the singer is suddenly 10 feet tall. Lyric
writer Rennie makes jokes between numbers ("If we're over $5,000 in debt
that means you're off your medication, right?"); they seem to push her
husband out of the nightclub, into the streets, until within minutes he's
wandering the prairie like Brigham Young with no one behind him.

Review from Amazon.com
Singing morbid mini-operas over simple country chord progressions and
ungainly programmed rhythms, the Handsome Family were once a better concept
than a live band. Their early shows, Rennie Sparks writes in this disc's
notes, "elicited chair-throwing and death threats." Live at Schuba's Tavern
is more than proof of Rennie and husband Brett's maturation as performers;
recorded in December 2000, the set--drawn mainly from In the Air , Through
the Trees , and Milk and Scissors --stands as a greatest-hits collection for
a band that's as likely to hit the big time as an experimental bagpipe
troupe. It's also a fine comedy album, rife with bickering shtick and
oddball anecdotes. And not least, this document of one of the duo's last
Chicago gigs (they moved to Albuquerque in 2001) is a typically macabre mash
note to the city that served as both the Handsome Family's home and muse.
Fittingly, it closes with "The Woman Downstairs": "I dreamed of lying down
on the el tracks," Brett rumbles over Rennie's wheezing melodica. "The
trains roared by under smoke-gray skies/Lake Michigan rose and fell like a
bird." --Anders Smith Lindall

UNCUT MAGAZINE, October, 2002

The Handsome Family
Live At Schuba's Tavern
4 Stars
For those unmoved by the HF's studio output, the live experience - a dark
uproarious disease all of its own - is guaranteed to swing it. One of the
last hometown dates before swapping Chicago for Albuquerque, those bruised
but beautiful songs are rendered almost incidental next to the
playfully-chiding marital banter (toothpicks, Vienna sausage, magic balls et
al). More George & Mildred than George & Tammy.
Rob Hughes