Duo’s Tales Hauntingly Steeped in Country

For someone with a reputation as a deadpan singer, Brett Sparks was a howling, growling aggressor at Spaceland on Friday, chewing up and spitting out the lyrics written by his wife, Rennie, like chaws of tobacco.

As the Handsome Family, this couple has staked out a distinctive patch in the folk-country wing of the indie-rock world, turning out five albums packed with haunting, enigmatic songs. Rennie writes verses commingling beauty and dread, and Brett sets them to music steeped in classic folk and country.

Though they produced all this work in their longtime home of Chicago (which they recently left), they have their backwoods vibe down pat. At Spaceland they came on as a Ma and Pa Kettle with graduate degrees in music and literature, bantering amiably between tunes and deploying minimalist instrumentation--Brett’s electric and acoustic guitars, Rennie’s bass and keyboard and autoharp, and some fill-in-the-blanks arrangements.

While they joked about the slowness of their tempos, the performances added an energy and edge to the songs. But the focus was on the lyrics, and Brett’s deep, insistent singing was always absorbing, keeping the crowd rapt at Rennie’s sad tales of extinct birds, drunken tantrums and troubled souls.

Richard Cromelin