The Handsome Family’s sixth album is possibly best remembered for “Far From Any Road”, the track that ended up in 2014 as the theme for the first season of the HBO TV series True Detective. It was set among Louisiana’s Gulf Coast bayous, a location almost as eerie as anything in the peerlessly weird musical worlds created by Brett and Rennie Sparks across a Handsome Family repertoire that by 2003’s Singing Bones was regularly turning songs into warnings, omens, anticipations of breakdown, predictions of trauma and disturbance; the musical equivalent of flapping ravens’ wings, something like that.
It was the first album Brett and Rennie recorded after they moved in 2001 from Chicago, the Windy City of popular account, to Albuquerque and the deserts of New Mexico, swapping urban hustle and Illinois winters for the kind of sunbaked borderlands and haunted Southwestern mesas that Calexico had been visiting regularly since at least 1996. They were a rock band, of sorts, to begin with, when they formed in Chicago in 1983. “Here’s Hoping”, on their first album, 1994’s Odessa, is more Hüsker Dü than later touchstone Hank Williams. On their second album, 1996’s Milk And Scissors, there’s a version of the venerable folk song “The House Carpenter” that makes you think of The Velvet Underground, a guitar solo on “Winnebago Skeleton” brings Crazy Horse to mind.
At the same time, Brett was also turning out straight country heartbreakers like “The Last” and “No 1 Country Song”, which could have been a hit for George Jones. By 1998’s landmark In The Trees, they had a sound that was uniquely their own, newly immersed in traditional American musics, the kind anthologised by Harry Smith. Rennie was writing all the words now and Brett set her stories and absurdist narrative vignettes to often gorgeous melodies that were a balmy counterpoint to the disturbing peculiarities of Rennie’s lyrics; their rippling disquiet and the sense in her songs that the unexpected was alive in everything and waiting to be heard. She had an unnerving flair for country death songs. That is, murder ballads, of which there were plenty. Through The Trees confirmed a sound that continued through In The Air (2000) and Twilight (2001).
These albums were recorded in their Chicago apartment and there is a feeling on Singing Bones of their music stepping outside itself, stretching its legs after a long confinement, enjoying whatever passes for fresh air in New Mexico, a breeze in its hair. Brett’s arrangements are as digitally meticulous as ever, but the sound is more naturally expansive. The subterranean panoramas of album opener “The Forbidden Lake” have a watery sweep that allows glimpses of covered wagons, the wreckage of crashed planes, submerged phantoms. The music has the cowboy strideof a laconic gunfighter ballad. There’s a familiar cast to some of the songs that’s freshened by new instrumental voicings. The bowed bass on the tender “Whitehaven”, elsewhere mandolin, pedal steel, organ, dobro, Spanish guitar, mariachi trumpet and castanets on “Far FromAny Road”. A version of Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1929 “Dry Bones” is a gospel shakedown.
Rennie’s storytelling is vividly unrestrained. “The Bottomless Hole” is like a digressionary episode in an Elizabeth McCracken novel. A farmer in Ohio has for years been tipping household waste, an occasional tractor, at least one dead cow, into a hole behind his barn that never seems to fill. He goes down to find out why, disappearing forever. On “The Song Of A Hundred Toads”, an amphibian choir serenades a dying gold miner. The undead staff the aisles of the “24-Hour Store”. The young woman in “Gail With The Golden Hair” is seduced by fire. A young soldier witnesses his own death on a fiery battlefield in the fine Civil War ballad “Fallen Peaches”, as moving as Dylan’s fabulous “’Cross The Green Mountain”. The a cappella “If The World Should End In Fire” and “If The World Should End In Ice” are apocalyptic hymns, Brett’s voice a multi-tracked End Times congregation.
This anniversary reissue comes with a bonus disc of demos, live versions and radio broadcasts. There are beguiling embryonic runs at “The Bottomless Hole” and “Whitehaven”; storming live takes of “Dry Bones” and “The Song Of A Hundred Toads”. A version of “24-Hour Store” from a concert in Copenhagen is even eerier than the one on the album. Better yet is a broadcast version of “The Forgotten Lake”, slowed-down and dreamlike, Brett and Rennie giving spectral voice to the ghosts of a vanished America.