Log #121 - The Twilight World Of The Handsome Family

Handsome Family - Twilight

Handsome Family - Through The Trees

Miles Davis - Panthalassa

Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden

Whiskeytown - Strangers Almanac

Santana - Caravanserai

It just struck me how the Miles Davis, Santana and Talk Talk albums are surprisingly similar.

The Talk Talk album is gorgeous. It has become a bit of an underground classic over the years. Talk Talk, if you remember, were a pop band of the new romantic age; they scored a few single hits and appeared on Top Of The Pops in the early 80s. Then suddenly, presumably after their success had granted chief Mark Hollis the time and budget to follow his true calling, the band came out with something altogether different.

Spirit of Eden (their 4th album, released in 1988) consisted of extended pieces of largely instrumental music that bordered upon prog, jazz, and ambience. Bizarrely the record company (EMI), typically shortsighted, later sued the band for releasing work that was not "commercially satisfactory"! Where have we heard that before?

In any case the band had the last laugh (their final album released in 1991 was entitled Laughing Stock) with Spirit of Eden now critically acclaimed and even recognised as an earlier pioneer of "post-rock".

Post-rock? Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Tortoise, Radiohead, Stereolab, Sigur Ros, Mono, 65 Days Of Static, Sounds Of The Lid, Explosions In The Sky...

The Santana album here is also their fourth. Here they move from a more "singles" approach from their first three albums - nicely summarised on their best Greatest Hits compilation - to something more progressive and expansive.

From the sleeve notes: Originally released in 1973, Caravanserai marked a creative turning point for Santana. Six years of phenomenal success over three albums and extensive tours, this album would represent an expanding of the band's musical scope. Caravanserai takes fans on a harmonic and spiritual odyssey through jazz. A true document of crystalline imaginative vision, Caravanserai is a milestone in the history of Santana.

The Miles Davis album consists of a bunch of remixes by Bill Laswell of previous tunes. There are four extended tracks from the early 70s era Miles and as such are concentrated on his jazz-rock fusion material. It works well as a standalone album.

I've offered up two albums from the peak Handsome Family period which I see spanning the turn of the millennium with Through The Trees (1998), In The Air (2000) and Twilight (2001).

My threesome with couple Brett and Renee Sparks started on hearing Weightless Again on a classic Uncut Americana cover CD I've mentioned before. 

Probably the greatest free CD ever given away with a magazine

The music is mainly the responsibility of hubby Brett but the lyrics are written by Renee who also writes short stories. 

The songs are a mix of the macabre;

So the young girl pierced her lily-white breast

Her blood poured over dark weeds

A silver dagger through her burning heart

Cold as the wind in the trees

The surreal;

There are birds in the darkness

That douse electrical fires

Flaring up in nursing homes

And the bedrooms of blind men

Birds you cannot see

The sad:

My ghost drives around with a bag of dead fish
Falling neutrinos drift through the trees
He staggers and reels, runs up credit card bills
And clogs up the toilet with bottles of pills
Here in the bipolar ward
If you shower you get a gold star

The unexpected;

Chicago is where the woman downstairs

Starved herself to death last summer

Her boyfriend Ted ate hot dogs and wept

With the gray rats out on the fire escape.

She died in June weighing 82

Her boyfriend went back to New York

The cops wandered through her dusty rooms

One of them stole her TV

And the amusing;

So long to my dog Snickers
Who ate Christmas tinsel
So long to Mr. Whiskers
Who jumped out of a window
And to the family of gerbils
Who chewed out of the cage
And the little brown rabbit
I ran over by mistake

You don't have to search long for great lyrics from Renee. Every song is a masterpiece of bizarre storytelling. I'm sure her short stories would be the same.

Never a band to reach much commercial success the Handsome Family did nevertheless score an indirect hit with the theme tune to the chilling first season of True Detective:

Finally a quick word on the Whiskeytown album.  Like The Handsome Family this group were at the forefront of the emergence of americana and alt-country in the mid to late 90s. They were fronted by Ryan Adams who disbanded the band after only 3 albums in 2000 and moved on to solo fame. Strangers Almanac is considered an early classic of the genre.

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A Morbid Pull On The Imagination - Honey Moon by the Handsome Family

News that Brett and Rennie Sparks – better known as The Handsome Family –– were to mark their 20th anniversary together as husband and wife with an album of love songs raised eyebrows rather than expectations. Was celebratory love a suitable subject for the dour, gothically inclined couple once memorably described as ''the Gomez and Morticia Adams of country music''?

Well, apparently it was. Although the dozen songs that make up Honey Moon, the couple's ninth album together, are far from what you might expect of billet doux. Peppered with jolts of danger and hints of regret, their dark-hued lyricism revels in the kind of mysterious, immersive intrigue that corkscrews its way through affairs of the heart when opposites attract and Cupid comes calling.

Until now, the flame that has burned for the Sparks has been dark and chill, the sensibility owing more to the slicing blue heat of an oxyacetylene torch than to the cosseting warmth of scented candles. But while Honey Moon finds The Handsome Family broadening its definition of romance and the romantic to accommodate a lighter tone and more filigree textures, you'll be relieved to know that troublesome undercurrents continue to tug at and tear the surface.

Happily (as it were) melancholy still seeps from every musical pore, rococo imagery still saturates every lyric, cryptic allusions and direct references to the world as observed by the Sparks remain deliciously imagistic and weird. The Dixie Chicks this ain't!

There's a burnt beauty to Honey Moon – something akin to Mark Twain re-written by Edgar Allan Poe – that exerts a deliciously morbid pull on the imagination and the emotions. Satisfaction is guaranteed.

Thank you to Michael Quinn for this review, shared under a Creative Commons Licence. The scoring is by EB.

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Log #67 - From Prog To Pop

Many bands of course change direction during their careers. Sometimes this is a natural progression or development. Sometimes it's an unavoidable result of changing personnel or a result of burnout leaving bands bereft of new ideas (how many bands shoot their loads completely with a tremendous first album which has in essence been many years in the making, but then understandably fail to follow up with a decent sophomore six months later?).

With the advent of punk and new wave in the mid to late 70s, many existing bands such as prog rock giants Genesis became "dinosaurs" and had to adapt to survive (or did they? Ed.). The Genesis transformation appeared dramatic and sudden with the release of Duke in 1980 but in actual fact had really begun a few years and albums earlier with the departures of key personnel setting in train subtle changes well before that transformative album.

German Krautrock trendsetters Can were already ahead of their time when they launched in the late 60s - their change in the mid-70s was a little more gradual as rather than punk and new wave, which they were already close to in the beginning and arguably influenced, they began to introduce elements of reggae and world music into their sound (being ahead of their time again).

The results were less than impressive though and like Genesis their core fans deserted. Genesis carried on obtaining unbridled commercial success with a new set of fans who had never heard Supper's Ready and didn't care. Meanwhile Can disbanded in 1979 leaving their original legacy largely intact notwithstanding a disappointing and short lived reunion album at the end of the 80s.

~

1. Beck - Colors

2. Neil Young - Hitchhiker

3. Bruck - Violin Concerto No. 1

4. Genesis - Turn it on Again, The Hits

5. Can - Anthology 25 Years CD 2

6. Handsome Family - Honey Moon

~

I have two greatest hits/compilations/anthology CDs in the player this week from these two important bands.  As regular readers know this is not normally something I advocate. But sometimes these catch all releases serve a purpose - for example you may not like the band enough to buy all the albums so just want a sample, or you just want to sample as a beginner before venturing deeper. 

In the case of Can, I do love the band (I was even named after them!), but this Anthology seemed a good choice in order to cover a lot of ground economically (having bought many of the albums before on vinyl which I no longer hold, I don't always replace all like for like with the CD formats). In particular this anthology has a good selection of their latter day material (post 1975) that doesn't really warrant purchase in its entirety (the key music from Can can be found on their first half a dozen albums or so starting with Monster Movie and ending with Landed in 1975) (but do check out their solo albums too Ed.).  Subsequent albums had their moments as the band dabbled with world, disco and reggae music, but the core Can sound which had made them so exciting and influential had gone.

Where a band is famous for extended improvisations a compilation album will also run the risk of inappropriate edits. How exactly can Hallelujah or Mother Sky for example be cut down to 5 minute samples? Having said that this compilation does it pretty well and the shortened tracks are not too grating - of course you've got to make sure you do hear the full versions of Hallelujah and Mother Sky on their original albums (Tago Mago and Soundtracks respectively), but note this CD does at least have the bonus of the unedited 20 minute You Doo Right from Can's debut album.

Similarly, yet more marked and (un)celebrated, was the change in Genesis around the same time. There can't be many bands who became so different as music fashions (and personnel) changed. This hits compilation is very heavily weighted to the latter day Genesis beginning particularly with the 1980 Duke album (although the change set in with the departure of Peter Gabriel and then Steve Hackett in quick succession following their Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974), and Wind and Wuthering (1976) albums respectively) - there are only two Gabriel era tracks on this 18 track album!

Unlikely Rock Trivia: Genesis were discovered by now disgraced record producer and radio presenter Jonathan King.

In fact being far from a fan of Phil Collins I have never had any desire to hear any post Gabriel Genesis. However this CD was a gift. Also my interest was piqued somewhat by an excellent ranking rundown I read here > http://www.prog-sphere.com/specials/genesis-albums-ranked/ which encouraged me to reassess (notice how the album covers deteriorated with the music too!).

What do I think now? Well, much the same really although I would say the chasm between the two incarnations is possibly slightly narrower than I had realised. They are still completely different bands and Collins is no Gabriel (keener prog era Genesis fans will also not underplay the influence of Hackett too). The prog era band produced some amazing original music with a charismatic front man. The pop music version went soft and became a vehicle for Phil Collins' constipated singing, thumping snare and syrupy love songs, covered in Tony Banks' synthesized cheese.

Are there any fans out there who like both the prog-Genesis and pop-Genesis?

From this to this - two very different beasts

And from this to this... nuff said

However it's not so bad and without the comparison of the original band Genesis Mark II may have been a perfectly reasonable pop band. Duke which was an affront to the existing fans was not such a bad album in itself (similarly time has been kind to King Crimson's 1980 comeback album Discipline for example which was a shocking release for their prog fans at the time but now seems quite revolutionary). To be fair, and in hindsight, Genesis Mark I.V did enjoy a prog swansong of sorts with three good post Gabriel albums that have each aged well - A Trick of the Tail, Wind and Wuthering (both 1976) and And Then There Were Three (1978), while downsizing from a five piece to an eventual trio (remarkably neither Gabriel or Hackett being replaced).

A few other new entries this week which may warrant more words at a later date. We have Beck's latest Colors which is very poppy and dare I say quite shallow compared to his usual work. I do love Stay Up All Night though.  Neil Young's Hitchhiker is a solo acoustic album from the mid-70s featuring slightly altered versions of songs from Rust Never Sleeps and various other previously unreleased tracks.  The title track is excellent and I love the version of Powderfinger which gives the song a completely different atmosphere. Best of all is Campaigner though with its famous refrain - "even Richard Nixon's got soul".

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Log #5 - The Handsome Family - Tales of Birds and Snow

An international flavour here with Americana pioneers The Handsome Family and Euro Symphonic Pop from German/Danish band, the classy Efterklang. The African continent is represented by Baka Beyond.

1. Efterklang - Piramida,

2. The Handsome Family - Through the Trees,

3. India Arie - Song Versation,

4. Baka Beyond - Ete,

5. DJ Vadim - USSR Repertoire,

6. Jill Scott - Who is Jill Scott?

A clean sweep this week, which is sort of surprising even to myself, as I was really enjoying the new Whitest Boy Alive entry and Kings of Convenience still (but sure they will make re-entries at some point). A change is sometimes enforced somewhat prematurely by other housemates with less staying power!

Efterklang are an amazing Danish band now making some of the greatest pop music out there today. Check out some of their videos on youtube. They started out a bit more indie and experimental and over the course of half a dozen albums (this one being their most recent) have matured into the consummate band - think Coldplay but with more originality and edge. Also great live, often with an orchestra. They've come a long way since I saw them in a room above a pub in Brighton.

The Handsome Family, and in particular this album, is where it all started for me, in Americana that is. I heard Weightless Again on a sampler album - "we stopped for coffee... in the Redwood Forest" and was hooked. Superb, albeit rather disturbing and bizarre, lyrics - short stories about birds, snow and death... 

The giant of Illinois

Died from a blister on his toe

After walking all day through the first winter snow

Throwing bits of stale bread

To the last speckled doves

He never even felt his shoe full of blood

Delirious with pain, his bedroom walls began to glow

And he felt himself soaring up through falling snow

And the sky was a woman's arms

Inspiring album artwork of nature and Through the Trees is this week's cover art, and my record of the week.

I don't know anything about India Arie except she has been championed by the late great Wayne Dyer. The songs are fairly middle of the road and quite souly and funky but er hem quite middly of the roadie. Neil Young famously said his Harvest album put him in the middle of the road and afterwards he headed straight for the ditch. 

Similarly Jill Scott is pretty new to me but this album sounds very current with laid back soul grooves reminiscent of some new chilled hip hop around at the moment (this CD has some of those annoying phantom tracks inserted at the end to thwart random plays, hence has to go in slot 6 of the magazine).

Talking of laid back you can't get more laid back than DJ Vadim - his average BPMs are so slow they barely register and make DJ Shadow seem like Metallica. I haven't really got into this album yet but his more song based Soundcatcher is brilliant.

Baka Beyond are a sort of Afro-Celt fusion band. Great live and sound how you'd expect with a bit of African music (specifically drums and guitars), and some Irish fiddly bits. Their best known album is probably The Meeting Pool but this is pretty similar, probably a bit more authentic to it's roots but less groundbreaking.

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