Handsome Family – Invisible Hands [EP]
With Invisible Hands, indie twang’s most outspoken Jewess has graced us with six lovely hymns about afterlife. Rennie Sparks says they reflect a long slump from which she sought solace in Christian radio and thoughts of heaven, which normally doesn’t figure into her faith. None of the songs specifically reference God or heaven, but these melodic forms have clear counterparts in 19th-century hymns and bluegrass songs. Brett Sparks sings and plays them at the pace of peace; Rennie’s autoharp and traditional, if sparse, harmonies allude to the same traditions on which the Carter Family drew.
The vinyl format helps secure sequencing as a song cycle. The opening track, “Tin Foil”, treats denial and fear of death, concluding with a line in which the singer imagines it might actually bring comfort. “Grandmother Waits for You” details the heaven of every child’s fantasy, where all creatures great and small live in harmony and no one ever grows old.
Illustrating Rennie’s exceptional heart for detail, “Bury Me Here” is a prayer to spend perpetuity “In the silvery mist…Down that foggy road the moon burns red as flame, weeds snap in the rain…Black bears crawl to sleep, tree sap slowly seeps and the sunrise never comes.”
Opening side two, The “Birds You Cannot See” form a graceful link between death and life, saving some and taking others. The choice of the traditional “Barbara Allen” is a puzzle, until you recall the final verse in which the lovers, in death, live forever in the rose and briar entwined. Finally, “Cathedrals” recalls a winter vacation in the Wisconsin Dells, a summer resort area. It closes the cycle contrasting great cold icons of faith, nature and commerce to the redemption and renewal found in just one other beating heart.
Gentle and reverent, Invisible Hands tucks you in with an ageless benediction: There’s comfort to be had in merely keeping faith with the far end of the tunnel.