Handsome Family

It was cosmically appropriate that our review copy of The Handsome Family’s sixth disc, Singing Bones, arrived the day that Johnny Cash died. The New Mexico husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks are true artistic children of the Man in Black, mixing traditional roots music with postmodern macabre about haunted all-night chain stores and doomed expeditions down bottomless pits. Brett’s deep bass is a perfect complement to Rennie’s lyrics, which aren’t so much standard verse-chorus-verse as melancholy story-poems with a dark, dry humor Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated. Bones is rich with somber alt-country, recorded and mixed entirely in the Sparks’s living room. Turn down the lights, knock back a whiskey and sing along.
400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, www.400bar.com