Husband and wife duo Brett Sparks and Rennie Sparks from Chicago will return to NZ this January to play shows in the North and South Islands.
Mystery Girl Presents The Handsome Family:
Wednesday 27th of January 2010 – Montecristo Room – Auckland
Thursday 28th of January 2010 – San Francisco Bath House – Wellington
Friday 29th of January 2010 – Chicks Hotel – Dunedin
Saturday 30th of January 2010 – Sounday – Hagley Park – Christchurch
Sunday 31st of January 2010 – Aratoi – Masterton
Tickets on sale from Monday 16th of November from www.undertheradar.co.nz Real Groovy (Auckland) Slow Boat (Wellington) Chicks Hotel (Dunedin) Aratoi (Masterton)
Press Release: The Handsome Family says; “Greetings fellow travellers on this ship spinning around the sun. Herein find secrets of the jellyfish and the latest from ye olde Handsome Family. Jellyfish have been living on Earth for millions of years—long before humans or even dinosaurs made their first appearance. The jellyfish has four stomachs and four clusters of eyes on each side of its umbrella-like body. Believe it or not, jellyfish also have four distinct brains”
The Handsome Family Biography
Taking place under bowed branches and deep within winding corn mazes, The Handsome Family released Honey Moon on April 14, 2009. Their eighth studio release, it celebrates the duo's twentieth year of marriage with a series of love songs that sharply contrast the dark themes of their previous seven releases. Full of an awed sense of emotion in the face of nature's mysteries, Brett Sparks (music) and Rennie Sparks (lyrics) branch from their usual canon of the dark and mysterious on Honey Moon, to establish a theme rooted in the tradition of 19th century romanticism. For the first time there is no body count. Not one person dies. There is only one song about a lost love. It is an album of transcendence, of touching the divine, if only for a moment, through our love of someone else, even if he is a katydid.
Rennie says of the pivotal point that influenced her writing on Honey Moon, We were driving over some mountains in New Zealand listening to The Platters singing, Twilight Time, and I could actually feel that gorgeous song healing little wounds all through my body. Life felt almost unbearably bittersweet after the song ended and I felt I had no choice except to sit down and try to write my way back into that mysterious palace where 'heavenly shades of night are falling.
Recording all their songs in a converted garage studio at the back of their Albuquerque house, Honey Moon, is a headphone record with layer upon layer of cool weird treasures waiting to be discovered with successive listens. The twosome's seventh CD, Last Days of Wonder (June 2006), was one of Mojo's Top Ten American Albums for 2006 and was called an unqualified triumph by Uncut. Their songs have been covered by many artists, most notably: Andrew Bird, Christy Moore, The Sadies, Sally Timms and Cerys Matthews.
They have appeared in the movie, I’m Your Man (2005), a tribute to Leonard Cohen as well as Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2004). In 2004, a reader's poll in Mojo named The Handsome Family's third CD, Through the Trees one of the ten essential Americana records. Andrew Bird's version of their song, Don't Be Scared was recently featured in the movie, The Promotion.
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing...Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice — GREIL MARCUS
As songwriters it's the eerie, ancestral voice of ‘Anonymous’ they ultimately resemble the most —THE CHICAGO READER
This is music that moves forward by turning the clock back— haunting, primal and strangely heroic —THE LONDON TIMES
Dark, elemental, mischievous and mournful —MOJO
