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Band: The Handsome Family Last Days of Wonder is the seventh album from The Handsome Family, which is the husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks. The album does not stray from the gothic Americana music of their earlier albums which take traditional country and folk music and combine it with Rennie's poetic, disturbing lyrics. Right from the title, Last Days of Wonder establishes a clash between the wonder, even transcendence, to be found in everyday objects and experiences and the impending doom that hangs over all life. So, it is fitting that the first song, “Your Great Journey,” describes the life of a ghost. The macro- and micro-cosmic observations of the opening lines (“Like four million tons of hydrogen exploding on the sun / Like the whisper of termites building castles in the dust”) clash wonderfully with the homespun country sound of the steel guitar. The Handsome Family has always been a band that plays with irony - not in the disaffected, arty sense of not meaning what they say, but in understanding that things can be real and unreal at the same time. The lyrics of “Your Great Journey” explore this by describing the journey from life to death. In this and other songs, the album also describes the disassociation that can come from lost connections. The flight images in the first song are echoed in the second, “Tesla's Hotel Room,” a song about early twentieth century scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla. The song is rife with birds, feathers, and flying spirits that reflect Tesla's own imaginative flights and disconnection from other people. He made himself solitary both by his physical isolation as a near hermit in his hotel room and his refusal to be swayed from his vision which combines science with spirituality. There is also a sense here and elsewhere that when science, or any theory, explains away the spiritual side of life, some of the beauty of the world is destroyed. It is in intangibility that Rennie finds the most wonder. “There was mystery singing from everything,” she writes in “White Lights.” In many of the songs she chastises those who refuse to see this mystery. Scientists like Edison or Westinghouse who exploit the natural world for cash. The Pilgrims of “Flapping Your Broken Wings” who see the Devil in the woods and kill off the pretty birds, perhaps to capture their beauty or out of hatred for the physical world. In “Our Blue Sky,” her views become polemic as she writes, “Could you love God if he didn't love you more than rivers, snakes, or wind?” For Rennie one must love the world not in spite of the flies, dirt, and pigs, but because of them. Most of these songs are sung by Brett in his smooth furry-bear voice, somewhat like a Tom Waits without the rasp. His almost deadpan delivery give the songs an admirable subtlety that befit Rennie's lyric observations of the tiny details of rusted chain link fences, light bulbs swaying in the nightbreeze, or grass-stains on a drunk's underwear. His melodies plumb the American landscape as surely as the lyrics, pulling in rustic country, ancient folk, berry jazz, and touches of the blues. The album hits a very gentle height with “White Lights,” a love song to the shabby simplicity to be found in a nighttime graveyard next to a highway. A mandolin fades in and out like “white lights swaying in the breeze.” As a couple sits together, nothing in particular happens, hands only almost touch. But there is a mystery which is singing from “the strip mall, the highway, the boarded-up skating rink.” Making records of that singing is what the Handsome Family does best. by Nemo Swift |
Happy is as happy does
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