If all you heard was the synth wash and piano chords that open Twilight, you might mistake the Handsome Family for an Abba knockoff. Then Brett Sparks starts to sing, the major key turns minor, and the dancing queen lies dead at the bottom of a frozen lake.
The Handsome Family cross-breeds Rennie Sparks’ fantastical, often bizarre prose poems with husband Brett’s well-crafted, almost-familiar melodies. The offspring are musical changelings, beautiful mutants.
Rennie once said that the main reason she does what she does is “to be better prepared to die.” The last five songs on Twilight develop a sort of cross-eyed eschatology that’s witty but somehow touching. In one number, a chorus of “I know you are there” leavens a laundry list of gruesome deaths. In “Birds You Cannot See”, invisible birds, “filling every tree,” put out fires in nursing homes and rescue children from wells. And in the final cut, “Peace In The Valley Once Again”, the last shopping mall closes, and the lizards, termites, swallows, wild boars and wilder horses fill up every niche. Paradise regained.
The Handsome Family’s third album, Through The Trees, remains their best. Some of the material there (“My Sister’s Tiny Hands”, for instance) burrows its way into the psyche with the force of chthonic myth. Overall, Twilight is gentler and less urgent, but it still makes a strong case for the Sparks’ musical worthiness.