Customer Reviews

Through the Trees

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

At their frequent best, Handsome Family poke relentlessly into the dark, the obscure and the unknowable of private and collective life on this planet. It is one brave undertaking. You won't be buying this or any other HF CD solely for the music. Brett's baritone vocals drone; the simple loping arrangements (albeit with occasional offbeat instruments like the dobro, melodica, and autoharp) recall nothing so much as the Happy Trails-type theme songs that played during the credits on TV's early-60's Westerns. But that uncluttered ordinariness is the perfect showcase for Rennie's lyrical, often inconclusive, stories. The best of this CD includes a coffee break on a trip through the redwoods that inspires ruminations on a couple's growing estrangement and floating -- in water as learning, in air as suicide (Weightless Again). Cathedrals contrasts man's monumental achievements and his thin moment in time ("everyone of us is swept away like breadcrumbs"). On Stalled, a man stuck in snow (snow, like drinking, is a constant motif to the HF work) grows colder and colder, but never leaves his pickup. Lovers commit dual suicides because -- it seems -- their love is simply too big for life (Down in the Valley of Hollow Logs). My only reservation about the Family is that their bizarreness on occasion comes across as mannered, which -- of course -- makes it a pose, just another suit to try on. The Woman Downstairs is one of two or three songs here to suffer that weakness. That keeps Through the Trees from five star status, but hardly changes my view that there's nobody around quite like Handsome Family, and lucky we are to have them.

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.

The Handsome Family create some of the most beautifully haunting and twisted music to ever come out of the sleepy midwest. Their songs about the wind through the trees, giant cathedrals and the woman that starved herself to death downstairs all resonate with various shades of blue heartbreak. It's amazing that this husband and wife team can create such haunting and heartbroken dark folk songs, and still stand to look at each other every day.

The songs float around the room like a familiar, yet unpredictable, ghost of a departed loved one. Peaceful and beautiful one moment, violent and frightening the next. But just like the ghost of a loved one, you'll miss them when they're gone, and you'll want to keep raising them from the dead every chance you can.

A truly beautiful album. There's a high level of literate musicality here.

There's a great gravelly rubato buckety vocal from Brett Sparks -- sounds like Johnny Cash with a touch of John Goodman in Barton Fink. Wife Rennie shows from the start that she can play anything: bass, keys, autoharp, and a kid's toy instrument called the Melodica, which she makes sound like a pump organ in a big wooden church somewhere in the Shendandoah Valley.

Each song -- lyrics by Rennie, musical crafting by both -- is really a little story. To look at the words on the liner notes is to see not much going on at first; there's a wry dose of banality at the surface, but an ironic twist or two draws you in, plus the gorgeous harmonies and lovely playing: the thing ends up kicking you right in the teeth. (in a nice sort of way)

I like a band that makes me go to the dictionary; this one I would have to call "mordant": incisive, dry, funny and deeply moving, the songs make me wonder: why haven't more people heard of the Handsome Family?

The state of alt-country and y'alternative is grim. With artists turning pop and the music becoming far more commercialized, it's nice to find an album as wonderful as this. The melodies are haunting, which is appropriate because the lyrics are as well. Rennie writes beautiful lyrics and Brett's baritone voice carries them well over simple tunes. The backup vocals and guitar of Jeff Tweedy make this an essential for the Uncle Tupelo/Wilco fan as well. 'Through The Trees' was my introduction to the Handsome Family, and after hearing it I was eager to acquire as many others as I could.

Originally turned on to the Handsome Family by their tie to Wilco's Jeff Tweedy I went ahead and bought a used copy of Milk and Scissors not expecting much. Not only was I wrong it quickly turned into my second favorite Cd of all time. As fast as I could I went ahead and ordered the rest of their catalog and what a find this was. This is now tied for my favorite CD with Pedro The Lion's Winners Never Quit. A solid CD from top to bottom with witty lyrics and beautiful harmonies. This band also really cares about its fans as evidence of a recent order I placed through their website. A Personal Thank You was sent from Rennie Sparks. I can't wait for their next CD

If Nick Cave did Alt Country This is what it would sound like. This CD is wonderful. Great dark moody pieces. The opening track is on a lot of compilations and I feel falls short of other tracks on the album like The Giant of Illionis, or My sisters Tinys hands. Great CD. Pick it up if you like Alt Country. It's indispensible if you like dark music and Alt. Country.

I'm reading through these 5 star reviews thinking "oh, there are other people out there who get it". I only got through a few before I gave up thinking this. I guess it's easy to tag something 5 stars when you have these empty little stars sitting there waiting to be filled. Also you are set up to fail in my eyes if you want to even begin to talk about this record with me. If you like it too, it means you don't like it as much as me. If you hate it, I am almost happier, as I get to dwell in my little exclusive club in my head, alone, a little longer.
I don't ever tell anyone about this album. I don't burn anyone copies, I don't include it in conversations concerning the best records I've ever heard. I don't like playing it often. I listen to it about 7 to 8 times a year only when the timing is right. I can't even fathom the perfection of the song sequencing, whether that was by design or not. The fact that some claim there are weak tracks on it at all is mind-blowing. The fact that the Handsome Family will never top this sits real well with me. I hope they never do. To me, there is the Handsome Family that made this record, and the Handsome Family that made all the rest, and i love both. When "I Fell" reaches its final seconds, leaving you heartbroken, and a quick hushing chill ends in your spine, "The Woman Downstairs" begins and you realize I am right in all you've just read.