Album: The Handsome Family

Singing Bones, Loose

Rarely, even in the fatalistic world of country music, has the precarious mystery of mortality been captured with such poetic grace as on Singing Bones, The Handsome Family's sixth album. Death stalks these songs, walking side-by-side with the lives it blights, an equal partner anxious to assure us that it is merely a transcendent, rather than terminal, state. Why else would the subjects of "The Song of a Hundred Toads" and "Fallen Peaches" approach their impending doom with such equanimity? In the latter, the narrator is a soldier who, having seen his fallen comrade's soul ("a fiery mist") depart his body for heaven, thrusts himself wilfully into a hail of bullets; in "The Bottomless Hole", it's simple curiosity which results in the protagonist's literal downfall, relating his story as he plummets eternally downwards.

There's no trace of irony in the mainstream country arrangements, full of lachrymose pedal steel and earnest harmonies, with which husband and wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks underscore the heightened poetic intensity of a song like "The Forgotten Lake", within whose inky depths "... covered wagons/ And the wings of missing planes/ Float beneath blind fish/ Underneath the velvet waves". Linking the cowboy past of besieged wagon trains with that most fundamental of modern travellers' fears, the air disaster, is typical of the way the Sparks adapt the doomy frisson of traditional folk songs to more contemporary situations. Likewise, "Sleepy" offers an account of alien abduction, delivered with the sententious sincerity of a gospel sermon, while "Dry Bones" - a reworking of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 original - recycles biblical imagery with Shaker enthusiasm.

Elsewhere, the forest and the desert are the sources of primal, atavistic spirits who lure the unwary to their doom in "Whitehaven" and "Far from Any Road", while the notion of spiritual presences obtrudes further into the mundane modern world in "A Shadow Underneath" and "24-Hour Store". In the former, an office worker goes about her business, trying to block out the subversive whispers calling to her from the other side, while the latter deftly evokes the plodding ennui of "the sleepless and lost/ push[ing] their squeaking carts/ Down the rows of clothes", blithely unaware of the "singing bones" and "crying ghosts" around them, represented by the weeping strains of bowed saw. It's some measure of Brett Sparks' vocal technique that he even manages to invest a line like "Opening and closing automatic doors" with a truly moving dignity and poignance, as if the doors in question were the very gates of heaven.

Bringing a striking apprehension of the numinous into the everyday present, Singing Bones is a masterpiece of modern American Gothic, an album that makes no compromise with the rhinestone-and-big-hat fakery of mainstream Nashville fare.