Playing Sardines in the Ghost Train: The Handsome Family's Twilight

Like most people I knew I first knew of the Handsome Family through their opening track in the Alt.Country CD attached to  ... no can't remember the magazine. Apart from the big spooky cavern of the sound and that lead vocal that seemed both high and bassy at the same time and the oddly lilting rythm Weightless Again had a lyric that went through you like an x-ray.

The tale of a relationship failing as it grew more ghostly by the day on a road holiday contained no rhymes but we got plenty of Indian tribes carrying around burning wood because they'd lost the secret of fire, the giant dripping leaves of redwoods in the same breath as spoons of powdered cream, their first sexual memory beside an image of intimate distance. And then there's the chorus about overdoses and suicide by falling from bridges so we can feel weightless again. By the end of it you don't know whether to shiver or burst into tears.

After napstering every album I could find I started needing the discs themselves. The picture emerged. Brett and Rennie Sparks, an odd couple of Texas good ol' boy and Yankee Jewish girl, put her observations of kitchen sink surrealism to an entirely unironically expert country lead by Brett's voice from the centre of the Earth. The rest of the album with Weightless Again lived up to that track pretty well (though nothing does, really). But by the time I got to Twilight I'd found a band worth following who didn't just happen upon a gem now and then but fashioned their own out of the trash and treasure of the everyday.

A murder-suicide car crash quietly observed from the window of the Snow White Diner while two deaf old women  hit the table and laugh too loud. A moment's intimacy sends the narrator of Passenger Pigeons to the freezing park because the lonliness of his apartment is too powerful. Someone else followed through every moment by an invisible dark eye. Haunting sounds, gravity and the unseen forces around it, contrails in the skies above the howling psychotics in the park, the weird literal or disturbing prayer of I Know You Are There, a two-line euology for every pet they've ever had, an indefineable feeling that glows as strongly as the light from all the tvs in town and Cold Cold Cold, one of the most genuinely unsettling ghost stories you'll ever hear sung. And that's just the lyrics.

All this is delivered over comfortable 2/4 rolls rich with lap steel and banjo and the smooth tide of Brett's huge voice. I've seen them live twice and they get away with the lot despite the size of these arrangements with just the two of them on stage, their very very funny banter and Brett's ocean deep voice. I remember him starting one song with a note so deep I couldn't believe it was real. But on record the music stays on the folky side of Nashville, hints at a tougher rockier edge (Snow White Diner). There's really nothing new here musically.

Rock music was born in a sexualised revolution but it was reared in commerce and grew to be the most conformist music of all. It hasn't innovated since about the mid-1980s because its practitioners know that all they need do is repeat what they already know. It's an old couple still trying to sit the straightest in the classroom. Don't rag on Keith Richards, he's fresher than most of your record collection (especially the new stuff).

So how comes it that a genre of popular music renowned and damned for its conservatism, a genre whose centuries-old roots remain clearly audible should provide such pure emotional challenge and compulsion when every new rock song sounds like Sweet Jane? Well, not all of it does but this of all the product of its professors in chief towers. Why? Because it's in as effortless a motion as the ghosts that travel through each of its lines.And just like them it haunts.