The Handsome Family
Twilight
Loose 2001

God, I love this band. This is the most recent album and I think it’s the best. It’s their fifth, I think. The previous two were pretty damn fantastic: Through the Trees, with the heart-stopping ‘Weightless Again’, and In the Air, which had a few wonderful things on it, especially the soaring heartbreak of ‘So Much Wine’.

They’re new country or alt. country or whatever you want to call it and generally get called something like ‘country noir’, which is about right. Brett sings and does the music and, where they were once fuzzy alternative types, it’s gradually become cleaner and purer, more traditional-sounding country. Rennie, his wife, writes all the lyrics and they’re the reason for the ‘noir’ bit. Each one is like a short story. Someone dies in nearly every song, usually killing themselves or at least dreaming of it, and a good few are about mental illness, like the wonderful ‘My Ghost’ on Through the Trees, which is about being hospitalised for bi-polar disorder (which Brett suffers from).

Part of the reason I like this one so much is the production. It’s just beautiful. It resonates like the sound in a church. And Brett’s voice has never sounded better, deep and fluid. Plus there are so many fantastic songs I can’t really pick out which are best. Well, OK: there’s ‘Passenger Pigeons’, which makes me want to cry right from the first line, ‘All the TVs in Town’, with its cowboy-on-horseback rhythm, the sheer twanginess of ‘Cold, Cold, Cold’, which gets you singing along as if it was ‘Jolene’. What can I say? They’re just brilliant tunes.

They’re great live, too. I saw them in the Union Chapel, which got the gothic thing right, and Rennie was hilarious with all this mad inter-song banter. Uncut (fine magazine) pushes them like fuck and they’re right to.