Brett and Rennie Sparks have been plying mannered gothic angst for so many years now the listener may be tempted to take the Chicago husband/wife duo for granted. Handsome Family albums – Last Days Of Wonder is their seventh – possess a mournful consistency but that, perhaps, is to their disadvantage: following the Sparks’ career, one has no sense of the music leading anywhere. For all the ghostly loveliness of their drizzle-flecked alt.country, they seem to have long ago slipped into a comfortable groove and show little inclination to move on – the blunt truth is that you only need one Handsome Family record in your collection.
Still, it's impossible not to fall mildly in love with Last Days Of Wonder. Steeped in sombre steel pedals and weeping banjos, the project possesses a sort of muffled grandeur – it evokes vast American horizons but also the grit and grime of truck stop motels and drab one-horse towns.
Like much Americana, the Handsome Family oeuvre invites cinematic rather than musical references. One hesitates to invoke David Lynch, an artist routinely taken in vain when the subject turns to surreal backwoods gloom, yet Last Days Of Wonder’s sweaty mix of weirdness and banality is properly Lynchian in tone. There are songs about the invention of electricity and ghosts wandering down supermarket aisles – the Handsome Family’s gift is to make Walmart feel stranger than life beyond the grave.