The Handsome Family: Honey Moon
Label: Carrot Top
This is, surprisingly from this dark duo, an album of love songs. I was going to crack that finally they’ve given us an album where nobody gets murdered, but then I noticed that one of the love songs appears to be from a praying mantis to his mate as she devours him. Yes, even when the topic is love, Rennie Sparks’s mordant wit can’t be staunched. And as usual she twists mundane things into weirdly discomforting metaphors: chain link fence entwined by a thorn bush as an image of love; broken windshield glass as diamonds; “the loneliness of magnets.” That these lyrics are sung in Brett Sparks’s soothingly ordinary voice, accompanied by low-key country rock from Brett and a few sidemen, is an important aspect of the wit; it works simultaneously as sincerity and irony. (Steve)
