I Love This Record - "Through the Trees" by The Handsome Family

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I Love This Record is a Bandcamp Notes column where we ask a fan to pick one record and tell us why they love it. It runs whenever we feel like it, but usually on a Bandcamp Friday.

Today, Penny Kiley on Through the Trees by The Handsome Family.

RIYL: Gillian Welch, The Harrow & The Harvest; Violent Femmes, Hallowed Ground; Margo Cilker; Jeff Tweedy

I remember the first time I heard “Cathedrals” by the Handsome Family, the fifth track on Rennie and Brett Sparks’s breakthrough 1998 LP. My first reaction was: What IS this? My second was: This is the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. 

That second line, incidentally, was what Jonathan Richman said when he first heard the Velvet Underground. The Handsome Family play country so they are not like the Velvet Underground. Except perhaps they are. Because they are bleakly beautiful and totally themselves.

I came out of a Handsome Family gig a few years ago to hear a disgruntled audience member complain that they were “not country.” Oh, they are more country than you’ll ever know. That doesn’t stop being true just because they’re weird.

Think of Hank Williams if he was on SSRIs instead of whiskey: Dark, deadpan, introverted songs with an undercurrent of melancholy and another undercurrent of humor. The sort of humor that not everyone gets. So lonesome you could laugh. 

The songs: unexpected, non-linear storytelling and strange, haunting imagery. Themes that you don’t find in country, but moods that you do. And music that you do find in country: the folky, timeless, lo-fi sort anyway. Brett and Rennie provide voice, guitar, banjo, bass, Dobro, melodica, autoharp, drum machine, piano; friends add violin, horns, and percussion. 

So, yeah, some unexpected items there too. But they work because it’s about atmosphere. The music sounds like what’s in the songs: snow and wind, trees and rivers, kisses and falling and deaths. 

Nearly 30 years on, it’s still one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard.

–Penny Kiley

Buy Through the Trees by The Handsome Family here.