This week's roots CDs reviewed

THE HANDSOME FAMILY
Honey Moon
Independent Records
★★★★

I guess I was getting frustrated with The Handsome Family. Brett and Rennie Sparks's last album, 2006's Last Days of Wonder just seemed contrived and weird for the sake of it. So there were no great expectations for Honey Moon. And what we get is a Bari-like revelation. The Handsome Family's new album is aglow with soft, utterly huggable retro country melodies and laced with lyrics of rural and romantic hues and playing that make a virtue out of less being most definitely more. Rennie throws her ghostly weight behind a couple of her lyrics, but it is up to husband Brett and his big, round irony-free vocals and subtle guitar-playing to make most of the hard yards. Recorded mostly at home, this album oozes easy charm and engaging oddity; for the former check out My Friend, and for the latter, the relatively experimental Love Is Likefits the bill without scaring the horses. www.handsome family.com

Download tracks: My Friend, Love is Like, The Winding Corn Maze

MADELEINE PEYROUX
Bare Bones Decca/Rounder
★★★★

This is a really important step for the Georgia-born chanteuse with a lightly smoked voice – her first album in which all songs are either written or co-written by her – and it works even if there are some wobbles along the way. Peyroux is blessed with an after-midnight voice of subtlety and serene tone, her phrasing in her three-album past drawing comparisons with Billie Holiday. Her unhurried style is matched by the band assembled by longtime producer/bassist Larry Klein; wonderfully fluent, you'll struggle long and hard to find a note out of place. But this is also part of the problem: in the main, it is too one-paced. And yet when the excellence of the melody matches the cool verve in her voice – as in the bright opener Instead – the world seems a neater place. The bulk of the songs, however, are darker affairs, bittersweet commentaries on love gone south – "My heart is like a hand-me-down . . .". But what a voice of velvet regret. www.madeleinepeyroux.com