The Handsome Family are stepping back out of their garage studio in New Mexico to appear at The Famous Spiegeltent as part of Sydney Festival, along with headline shows in Melbourne and Perth.
Everyone’s favourite husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks celebrate 14 years of recording together and 20 years of marriage not with a retrospective, but with the release of their eighth studio album Honey Moon. It’s a record of love songs in the true romantic sense. Rather than dwell on country gothic doom and despair, they’ve recorded all manner of love songs– odes to sex, devotion, redemption, sacrifice, New Mexico, and more sex. ‘Honey Moon’ takes place under bowed branches and deep within winding corn mazes. Lovers kiss in dripping wet caves and call to each other from trembling mountain peaks. They sigh on windy drawbridges and weep silver puddles in the street. In the spirit of true collaboration Brett Sparks, blessed with a beautiful baritone and a former music student, does the singing and composing. Wife Rennie Sparks, an accomplished novelist and poet, does most of the song writing, leading to the unusual and striking form of the Handsome Family’s songs — evocative scenes and brief tales (of both the daydream and ghost story varieties) in lieu of the standard verse-chorus-verse structure.
‘Honey Moon’ is out now
Sunday 10th January – Rosemount Hotel, Perth
Tickets from www.moshtix.com.au, 1300 GET TIX (438 849) and www.heatseeker.com.au
Stores: Star Perth, Mills Records Fremantle and Planet Video Mt Lawley
Wednesday 13th January – Prince Bandroom, Melbourne
Presented by RRR
Tickets from Polyester (City and Fitzroy), Greville, Missing Link, POW public bar (03 9536-
1168) & www.princebandroom.com.au
Thursday 14th + Friday 15th January – The Famous Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival
More info: www.sydneyfestival.org.au
TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY 13TH NOVEMBER 2009
