The Handsome Family

The Handsome Family is what happens when American country music settles in the cold cities of the north and is embraced by young folks who grew up watching Twin Peaks and eating too much sugar. It's a lush and rich take on the genre that gently swings to a kind of old fashioned waltz time but behind all the sweetness and the softly plucked melodies, you can sense a saccharine chill.

This would, in the main, be down to the lyrical concerns of Rennie Sparks, a woman who writes about people who drink too much and fall down dead in the snow, about bi-polar imbalances and strange events in the haunted woods. Her husband Brett obliges with the vocal duties, testifying to these warped tales like an old time riverbank preacher who might have some dark secrets of his own.

You can trace all kinds of influences in this Chicago-based act. In Brett's delivery, a throaty gothic rumble, you can hear the murder-ballad phrasing of a Nick Cave. Rennie's story-songs unfold with unexpected nuggets of grim detail, like the yarns of Flannery O'Connor when the old southern writer got good and weird.

If you were to place them in some kind of contemporary context, The Handsome Family would probably be boxed with the lo-fi, miserabilist movement in the US that is figure-headed by Will Oldham, but for me there's a shrill note of useful psychosis in their music that distinguishes them from the everyday grumps.