The Handsome Family
Hollow
Loose Music
2023
Hollow, the 11th studio album from The Handsome Family, marks their 30th anniversary. Singer Brett and lyricist Rennie Sparks (and longtime drummer Jason Toth) serve up a varied selection of pandemic-written songs that, steeped in their brand of melancholic Western Gothic, veer between the familiar languid acoustic and more electric touches.
It opens with the slow walking Joseph, notes cascading like hymnal notes, electric guitar complementing the tinkling piano, a song born of a nightmare Rennie had, waking up shouting, “Come into the circle, Joseph/There’s no moon tonight”, an enigmatic and slightly eerie lyric continuing “Pull up the floorboards/Tap on the walls/Look into the eyes of the old porcelain doll” like something out of one of those Annabelle horror movies.
They slide into a slow trip-hop groove on Two Black Shoes with its vision of a post-pandemic desolate America (“Cardboard box and blanket/Stolen shopping cart/Hide beneath the overpass/Kicked out of the park…Swallow all your sleeping pills/Shop away the gloom/Scrub the kitchen counters/Lock the door to every room”), the titular image making a change from black dogs as an image of depression.
By contrast, The King of Everything, with its harpsichord background, is a jauntier, fairground carousel feel, balancing upbeat images of nature (“See the grey dove/Up in the green elm tree…He calls across the trees/Doesn’t care who hears him/The sky is his”) with a seeking of blissful oblivion (“me in my chair/As the pills reach my brain/I call out to the bees/Come make honey from my pain”).
Skunks, with its tinkling Beethoven-inspired piano and lines about “Squirrels in the basement / Raccoons in the walls / Centipedes with stingers,” has a madrigal waltzing sway rhythm as Brett softly conjures a pest control business doing anything in trying to regain the custom lost in lockdown (“We’ll sterilize your yards/Run your dogs around the park/Now we have rental cars/Stop by our cocktail bar/Call us day or night/We’ll haul your trees away”) as Rennie coos eerily in the background.
Featuring dobro and Dave Gutierrez on trilling mandolin gives an old time flavour to The Oldest Water, the true story of a primordial sea found deep in the Kidd Creek Mine in Timmins, Ontario, in 2007 and a second some years later, affording Rennie the relationships metaphor of “The first living cell/Growing fat in the shallows/Met the first stranger/When it split down the middle/But once made separate/There’s no going whole/Water loves melting/Flesh eats alone”.
Apparently inspired by how a Buddhist friend of Aleister Crowley wore an old purple coat from which moths would continually fly from its pockets, he refused to harm them, Mothballs is a simple Shakers-like hymn for voice and piano about casting off earthly things and surrendering to the primal core (“When the weight of life/Fills your heart with stones/And the dreadful wind of sadness/Buffets you in storms/Let the moths eat your beautiful coat/Go to terrible places/Fill yourself with fear/Beckon the screaming demons/Lie down with starving bears”).
Another based on actuality, featuring Rennie’s banjo, the dreamy, crooned, softly-strummed, piano tinkling waltztime Shady Lake refers to a real fishing hole in the cottonwoods outside of Albuquerque “Where the wind goes to sleep/Trout glide beneath the lily pads/And the tall orange reeds”, the image of “Two swans with their feathers/Whiter than snow/Twine their necks in a love knot” rising up an affecting image of nature rising up from the dark waters after the pandemic. And from shady lakes to shady groves with To The Oaks with its na na na chorus, as Alex McMahon’s guitars jangling and twanging, and to a steady drum beat, it again draws on nature imagery as Brett sings, “Phantoms fly the forest/Twist up dripping ferns/Spirits in the shadows / In root and dirt and bone”. It remains in a pastoral reverie for the piano-led and vibraphone-tinged Strawberry Moon, sat on the porch at night watching raccoons in the yard and listening to cicadas singing.
Another with an old time backwoods hymnal quality, the penultimate Invisible Man is a call to rid ourselves of toxic masculinity and propensity for violence (“Can you see your hands/Without bathing them in blood/Can you catch them in the light/Without picking up a gun?/Can you see your hands/When you clench your fists/Or do you have to strangle/To finally feel your wrists?”) and greed (“Drop your fist of coins”) to draw upon the healing balm of nature (“Bathe them in the ocean/Plant them in the ground/Feed them to the swooping birds/Let them fly around”).
It ends with its most country track, the woozy, slide, glockenspiel and pedal steel-streaked honky tonk waltzer Good Night. In this lullaby, the soothing melody is offset by rather disturbing lyrics (“Time for the ghosts/To pull on their sheets/Time for the goblins/To brush their teeth…Time for Santa/To sharpen his claws/Time for skin walkers/Time for the saw”) though, as the now staple show closer, it signs off with “We’ll be out by the merch table/After we pack our stuff”.
Form an orderly queue. One of their more musically complex albums, exploring new sonic textures yet still reassuringly sounding familiar, this marks a welcome return and an interesting suggestion as to where the road ahead might lead them.