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Handsome Family - Honey Moon
| Avclub |
| Brett and Rennie Sparks have been married and making music for more than a decade, and over that time, they’ve settled into a signature sound combining Brett’s deep baritone and penchant for mid-tempo alt-country balladry with Rennie’s surreal, macabre, often whimsical lyrics. For eight albums, the approach has yielded more than its share of solidly crafted gems, though by now surprise is no longer much of a factor. The new Honey Moon colors within the same lines. Recorded to mark their 20th wedding anniversary, the album narrows the lyrical focus to a single topic—love—and downplays the murder ballads and apocalyptic imagery of earlier discs. Still, Rennie’s choice of romantic imagery is as genially warped and haunted as ever. “A Thousand Diamond Rings” returns to a favorite theme of finding moments of strange beauty in the utterly mundane, as an Albuquerque sunset reflects off broken glass next to a pawnshop. She paints an idyllic vision of love in verdant groves in “Junebugs,” but her puckish sense of humor turns that idea on its head elsewhere, exploring the tenderness in the courtship of insects and primitive cave-people: “I perch on branches and bellow, while dreaming only of thee.”...full text |
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| Nowtoronto |
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The eighth studio album by Albuquerque’s Handsome Family commemorates the 20th wedding anniversary of Brett and Rennie Sparks, the band’s two members. As such, it’s an album of love songs, making it a departure from the Gothic Americana subject matter of past efforts, which, the joke goes, always included at least one dead body. Though the songs, which effortlessly blend country, bluegrass, folk and pop, are mostly under three minutes long, no one’s in a rush here. Each is gently strummed, sparsely drummed and deeply crooned by Brett. Rennie takes care of the lyrics (and a few sweet harmonies) and deftly avoids love’s clichés, comparing it instead to paper cups rolling down a windy street, a hole in the roof where an old sugar pine fell through, the sun glinting off a pickup truck’s smashed windshield....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Since releasing their first album in 1995, Brett and Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family have built a cottage industry out of creating some of the most charmingly morbid songs in contemporary music; death, despair, alcohol, broken dreams, and dashed hopes are common ingredients in their songs, leavened with dark wit and dressed up in lovely, austere melodies and close Appalachian-flavored harmonies. But with Brett and Rennie celebrating 20 years as husband and wife, they decided to try something a bit different for their eighth studio album, and 2009's Honey Moon is a collection of 12 non-ironic songs about love. If you're expecting that this is going to be a bit sunnier than the usual offering from the Handsome Family, you're right, but that's not to say that odd little clouds don't appear on the horizon. In "Little Sparrows," the literal lovebirds of the title are watching cars from a highway overpass, "A Thousand Diamond Rings" opens with a litany of urban detritus such as broken-down trucks and smashed windows, "Darling My Darling" is sung in the voice of an insect attempting to seduce a female of the species, and "The Loneliness of Magnets" uses elementary physics as a metaphor for romance. The Handsome Family aren't exactly rewriting "You Light Up My Life" here, but they're not rewriting their previous albums, either; Honey Moon is the duo's most eclectic album to date, with Brett and Rennie cautiously embracing the sound of classic pop ballads ("Linger, Let Me Linger"), vintage R&B ("My Friend"), Tin Pan Alley crooning ("The Loneliness of Magnets"), and electronic pop ("Love Is Like") along with the traditional country and folk influences. Despite the new textures, Honey Moon still sounds like the Handsome Family, but a version of the Handsome Family that hasn't abandoned the notion of hope, and by the time "The Winding Corn Maze" closes out the album, you're not entirely shocked that the protagonist actually finds who he's been looking for amidst the stalks. On first listen, anyone familiar with the Handsome Family will keep waiting for someone to die or go insane as if wondering when the shoe will drop, but ultimately Honey Moon proves they can ease into more optimistic surroundings and not lose touch with the strange and ethereal qualities that have made them worthwhile....full text |
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