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Feted by the press, adored by Ringo Starr and covered by Cerys Matthews, the Handsome Family have released an easy album-of-the-year contender.

Singing Bones by the Handsome Family

"Brett and Rennie Sparks are the two halves of a sick and beautiful musical brain" - Jeff Tweedy, Wilco , speaking in MOJO.

Feted by the press, adored by Ringo Starr and covered by Cerys Matthews ladies and gentlemen: the Handsome Family.

Over the last nine years, husband and wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks (aka The Handsome Family) have recorded a series of albums that has established them as one of America's finest songwriting partnerships.

Now relocated from Chicago to New Mexico the couple were, until recently, a well kept secret - but the patronage of Ringo Starr on USA chat shows, sell out concerts across the UK and Europe, extensive coverage in the national press and high profile appearances on BBC TV and radio shows, including: The Jonathan Ross Show, Andy Kershaw's world music show and Later With Jools Holland have changed all that.

In addition the band has recently had one of their songs - Weightless Again - covered by Cerys Matthews on her solo debut album Cockahoop. More recently they were joined onstage in NYC by Nick Cave and Linda Thompson at a massive outdoor musical celebration of the songs of Leonard Cohen.

Mail Order Software

Despite such noteworthy support the band rely on a very DIY ethic when it comes to making music. On a quiet street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sequestered in their secret garage studio the Handsome Family, again relying on their usual array of pawnshop instruments and mail-order software, recorded Singing Bones.

It's their sixth album and according to Rennie is designed to "rip holes in the veil between this world and the next with its songs of haunted Wal-Marts, lovers who chase the fire in streetlights, the madness of very deep holes, a lake that can only be visited in dreams, and the shadows that whisper inside a modern office building".

The subject matter of their songs are without equal and have earned the band praise from many quarters. In a recent report on American folk music for Granta, Greil Marcus described how Rennie's lyrics have "in their everyday surrealism, no parallel in contemporary writing" while Brett's vocals "mine the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice". He also referred to them, somewhat casually, as "the Beatles of the folk world". No small tribute...

In their live performances, The Handsome Family will sometimes be two and a minidisc player and sometimes be three (when they can squeeze Brett's brother Darrell into the car with his drum set). But either way their live performances will - says Rennie - strive to be as beautiful and creepy as a thorny rose twisting around the bleached jawbone of a dead horse.

Singing Bones

Andy Gill made Singing Bones 'Album Of The Week' in The Independent (10 October), awarding it four stars, saying: "Rarely, even in the fatalistic world of country music, has the precarious mystery of mortality been captured with such poetic grace...Death stalks these songs, walking side-by-side with the lives it blights, an equal partner anxious to assure us that it is merely a transcendent, rather than terminal, state.

He continued: "Bringing a striking apprehension of the numinous into the everyday present, Singing Bones is a masterpiece of modern American Gothic, an album that makes no compromise with the rhinestone-and-big-hat fakery of mainstream Nashville fare."

The complete tracklist for Singing Bones looks like this:

1. The Forgotten Lake
2. Gail With The Golden Hair
3. 24-Hour Store
4. The Bottomless Hole
5. Far From Any Road
6. If The World Should End In Fire
7. A Shadow Underneath
8. Dry Bones
9. Fallen Peaches
10. Whitehaven
11. Sleepy
12. The Song Of A Hundred Toads
13. If The World Should End In Ice

"They come from Hell's ditch, armed with love" - NME

Former albums In the Air, Live at Schuba's Tavern, Milk and Scissors and Odessa are all still available. Singing Bones is out now, on CD only, from Loose.

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