Music / alt-country
Review: The Handsome Family, St George’s
Given the All-American Gothic undertow to the Handsome Family’s work Friday the 13th was an appropriate date to be seeing them, and for once St George’s ecclesiastical furnishings did not seem out of place. “Welcome to the service” Brett Sparks intoned and there was indeed something of a reverential atmosphere in the well-filled pews.
Yet there’s something about the Handsomes clever ‘Emporor’s clothes’ combination of wide-eyed child and cynical adult (polarised between neatly dressed Rennie’s self-mocking scattiness and crumpled Brett’s abrupt insensitivity) that makes you feel included, not least by the willing suspension of disbelief.
Tonight the spouses stood as far apart as possible, enhancing the sit-com fractiousness of their between song banter, while drummer Jason Toth wisely kept his head down in the middle. Rennie alternated between Autoharp and a Kala ukulele bass, Brett stuck to Stratocaster and a bank of pedals. Between them and Jason’s drum kit they made a fine tight sound that conjured the purest of country music to accompany the most unlikely of song subjects. The set included songs about frogs, a houseful of owls, Tiny Tina (the world’s smallest horse), a man’s unfinished trip into a bottomless hole and mad scientist Nikola Tesla.
To any non-English speaking listener they would have sounded indistinguishable from lost Johnny Cash rockers or George Jones ballads, but Rennie’s lyrics are always a blatant corruption of the Nashville rulebook. Throwing out the pious nonsense of schmaltzy sentimentality, jingoism and religion by which country music often runs they celebrated their own ideas of preposterousness in order to make Tex-Mex burritos out of the music’s sacred cows.
For an audience also presented with the acerbic comedy of the Handsomes’ on-stage relationship the effect is like repeatedly encountering a stand-up double act while walking round an exhibition of disturbingly surreal paintings. That it was all straight faced – not least across the audience – made it intentionally hilarious, too, and our shared disingenuousness was the conspiratorial glue to the evening. In a world increasingly threatened by self-righteousness the Handsome Family’s delicious absurdity seems a vital shred of sanity and we would all do well to cling to it.
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