Through the Trees

Handsome Family

Product Details

• Audio CD (January 26, 1998)
• Original Release Date: January 27, 1998
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Carrot Top Records
• ASIN: B0000061O4
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #42,934 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #20 in	Music > Indie Music > Alternative Rock > Alternative Folk
  #26 in	Music > Indie Music > Folk > Contemporary Folk

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
For their second album, Brett and Rennie Sparks take a more serious approach, eschewing the jokier elements of their debut and concentrating on writing country music with an urban sensibility and a post-graduate degree. It's doubtful that any previous country album included songs in praise of Cologne Cathedral or Lake Michigan, but backed by the Sparks' austere songs--often just guitar, autoharp, and drum machine--with occasional help by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, the music has an almost Appalachian simplicity and newfound depth of feeling. Like coming across a brownstone in the mountains, the Handsome Family's music is simultaneously disconcerting and strangely beautiful. --Steven Mirkin

Entertainment Weekly
Rennie and Brett Sparks write songs that defy easy labeling. . . . [Through The Trees's] best tracks are at once lilting and dangerous, like shiny toys with sharp edges. . . .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Goth Country, February 10, 2000

By	David J DeCastris (Rockford, IL) - See all my reviews

Goth country is the first thing that comes to mind. This album picks up where Johnny Cash and Devo left off offering a twisted storytelling/yet purely personal midwestern view of 2 tortured beautiful souls, Brett and Rennie Sparks. This cd sat in my collection for a year and a half before it finally hit me. Definitely a mood piece requiring a dark room with one candle lit in the corner. Brett's voice will haunt you and enlighten you all in one sitting. Horrifically beautiful.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lovely album featuring several utterly gorgeous, haunting songs, August 16, 2006

By	Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is rightfully celebrated as the Handsome Family's finest album. It isn't perfect--several of the songs are a couple of notches in quality below the best efforts--but there are several songs that are absolutely unforgettable. People have debated whether it is country, neo-traditional, folk, or whatever, but while the form of the music would make it some kind of alt-country effort, the lyrics send it off into its own unique genre. These songs are STRANGE. If this is country, name me another country song that in any way resembles "The Woman Down the Stairs" or any folk song that bears any resemblance to "My Sister's Tiny Hands." I have trouble putting the Handsome Family into any kind of country genre for a simple reason: in most country songs, people's lives are broken while the world is essentially OK. But the Handsome Family's songs are metaphysical; they describe a broken world, so broken that the people are by necessity lost, bereft, doomed. It is music that is Gothic in the sense that Nathaniel Hawthorne was Gothic, not Marilyn Manson. Better, their songs could be compared with the work of Ray Bradbury. Although he is mistakenly thought to be a Sci-fi writer, it is more accurate to describe him as a master of the Weird Fiction genre. The songs of the Handsome Family shares more than a few qualities with this genre.

About a third of the songs on this album are masterpieces, another third very good, and a third just sorta drab. If the weakest songs had been replaced, this would have been one of the great American albums ever. Even as it is, this is essential. "Weightless Again" is just stunning, built around a simple, lovely, forlorn melody, but essentially a meditation on why people do some of the more extreme, self-destructive things they do to themselves. "My Sister's Tiny Hands" is an almost equally beautiful gem about losing a twin sister. "Last Night I Went Out Walking" is not as strong melodically, but it contains heartbreaking and deceptively simple lyrics about a rebuked lover tempted to commit suicide by drowning. But "The Woman Downstairs" almost makes that song sound like a lark with its multiple horrific images concerning a woman who starved herself to death.

The Handsome Family is a family in fact: Brett Sparks sings most of their songs and writes the music while his wife is a fiction writer who here pens the lyrics for the songs and contributes Autoharp. Their first two albums--ODESSA and MILK AND SCISSORS--showed flashes of excellence but neither was consistently good throughout, and both featured songs that seemed stylistically out of phase with the rest of the album. But on THROUGH THE TREES they settled into a consistent style throughout, embracing a simple, understated sound. The result is one of the finest albums to come out of Chicago in the past decade. Whether it is alt-country, folk, neo-traditionalist, indie, or whatever really isn't important. What it mainly is, is good.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If this is country music... I love it., August 3, 2003

By	D. A. Magee "amagee17" (STL, MO, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What an incredible CD. Haunting. Beautiful. Evocative. Brilliant. Powerful. Disturbing. Melodic. Moody. This CD will make you an instant fan of The Handsome Family and you will have to buy all of their other titles as well. These songs will creep up on you before you know it, and take root deep in your subconcious where they will continue to haunt you like distant memories and old family photos.