What does success look like?
To most bands major exposure, recognition and larger crowds – but that is just one definition.
After years of ploughing their own furrow, all it took for The Handsome Family was one phone call and another definition of success was beckoning. Yet to hear the band tell the history of how they became the unlikely centre of a different success story, it would seem that this isn’t their definition at all, regardless of what HBO or the press are telling them.
The reality is that The Handsome Family are about a lot of things, and this new chapter is merely getting in the way of so much more. And how do we come to know this, like so much else about the band? We know this because they tell us. This is by no means all they share, in fact, sharing is key to their performance at Manchester’s Gorilla venue.
The show Brett and Rennie Sparks give is personal and intimate. They are playing songs that mean more to them than just music; this is their life. Not some cliched, tattooed across the chest, shout from the rooftops, angry display to prove some point. No, this is actually their life, sung about and discussed in detail.
Songs about the banalities of a lifetime together are performed as earnestly as songs about the meaning of life, the universe and everything that goes with it. The songs are focused on minute details and loaded with passion and intensity; theirs is a life that has not only been lived but considered. These tiny details are given space, and scope, they genuinely seem to feel a personal bond with the audience, there are no generalities, the whole show is a dialogue, always frank and open about their time together not only as a band, but as a couple. Songs that on record felt brooding and full of mystery, now become clear and detailed portraits of real people and the natural world that surrounds them.
Not everyone spends their afternoons in the garden hallucinating, or considering why cats never buy their albums. Most bands wouldn’t sing about suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge, or tell detailed stories from their own relationship to entertain an audience. Yet it’s in this unusual and unorthodox approach that the Handsome Family are triumphant. This is in no way formulaic, or just a rehearsed performance by numbers, it is a biography, an open and shared living history of their time together, which in many ways makes this so much more than just a gig. The resonance that this style gives the already solemn and emotional music is in itself an integral part of what makes this a beautiful gig.
So on such a rainy evening in Manchester, it is unexpected to feel such warmth – Manchester’s gloomy weather has never had a more suitable soundtrack. This is music that is about the grey areas in life, something this city has a lot of knowledge of. It is a shared moment, a coming together, which in live music is the rarest of things, they are not playing music to you, they are playing music for you.
Surely that is all you could want from any band.
(Dylan Llewellyn-Nunes)