NextFest Review

The Handsome Family's Brett and Rennie Sparks, on the other hand, had to win over a chatty throng. (As scene veterans will note, this may have made the former Chicagoans feel right at home: For years the pair took their lumps and made their bones on local stages, most of all Lounge Ax.)

They were in fine form Wednesday. When Rennie wasn't wrapping airy harmonies, melodica and meandering banjo lines like vines around Brett's guitar progressions and his baritone tales of deserted motels and crying ghosts, she was slinging deadpan humor with an emphasis on the dead.

In a sense, the Handsome Family was an apt choice for an event nominally oriented to the future; their songs are frequently concerned with fate, or the day when rabbits finally inherit the husks of our shopping malls. To hear them tell it, that day is coming sooner than we think, and actually, it doesn't sound so bad

read it all - Tweedy Sees A Future...