The Handsome Family + Daniel Knox @ The Temple, 7th March 2015
Two of the Chicago based label, Carrot Top Records’ brightest offerings, are the reason for the impressive draw of fans gathered together in the upper reaches of the Institute’s Temple room. Although most will undoubtedly be in attendance for The Handsome Family‘s bluegrass soaked explorations of murder, mental illness and magnetic isolation, there may be a small contingent here anticipating an exploration of the far more recognisable and only slightly less harrowing concept of the shopping mall, the latter relayed to us by exquisite Daniel Knox.
With a new self-titled album to promote, Knox nonchalantly makes his way across the tiny stage to take up the solitary position at his piano, the only accompaniment, emanating, occasionally, from a laptop concealing a thousand swathes of sonic orchestration. Knox begins with ‘Blue Car’, the opening song from his new record, which is already garnering rave reviews from the likes of Uncut. The beginning of the song see’s Knox singing in a wonderfully rich baritone voice, which makes a gradual ascent to an equally impressive falsetto come the conclusion. Knox immediately makes a joke about having just got his “weird” song out of the way, before continuing onward with his set and the less weird, starkly titled Don’t Touch Me – a song Knox claims to have been inspired by his own germophobic tendencies and by two people that regularly attend his shows, blissfully unaware that their hygiene levels stirred so much foreboding in him, that he had no alternative but to address the issue in a song.
Where The Handsome Family firmly situate themselves in making the unfamiliar familiar, by contrast, Daniel Knox’s songs revel in questioning any such notion of familiarity, opting to base many of his songs from a wholly unusual viewpoint. The easily dismissive notion of the shopping mall as a vacuum of banality and conformity is transformed in the song ‘White Oaks Mall’. Knox prefaces the song by pointing out that he’d pass these buildings on a daily basis, oblivious to the memories and events that had played out within their walls – “these are places I went with my father, places I take my daughter”. The significance of these mundane locations and the situations therein, offer interesting settings in which to venture. Knox is a performer certainly worth further investigation. His reputation will almost certainly continue to grow as the new album finds its place in the world.
And so to the headliners, some twenty years into their musical union, the unmistakable pairing of Brett and Rennie Sparks take to the stage with minimal fuss, ready to bestow their weaved threads of fact and fiction in the form of the age-old tradition. Their opening two songs – The Giant of Illinois and Weightless Again – demonstrate perfectly, the duo’s propensity for disclosing both historical and personal trauma in the form of song.
Each song is introduced with either Rennie or Brett, occasionally, at the same time – the husband and wife playfully talking over one another – offering a questionable back-story to each songs origin. Questionable because, it is sometimes hard to detect which one of them is telling the truth, and which one is teasing, in order to bookend each song with a playfulness that eases the sometimes difficult situations and themes covered during their music.
Later on in the evening, Rennie will offer up the tale of her beloved cat and its unshakable determination to capture every drop of milk from an abandoned milk carton as the primary inspiration for the song Sad Milkman – then again, it does sound like the kind of place these gifted songwriters would choose to haul the catalyst for a song from.
At one point during the encore, which see’s the band perform So Much Wine and Frogs – the latter allowing Brett to let rip with an astounding guitar solo, dripping with tonal evanescence – it would appear that Rennie has picked up on another potential idea for a song. The group describe how taken they were with the final destination of the 50 bus that they’d noticed on Digbeth high street earlier that day – “we saw a bus heading to Druids Heath…sounds wonderful”. The audiences response leaves them quite clear as to the kind of place the heath is, quickly dispelling any notions of misty, moonlit fields, home to mysterious cloaked figures. At the culmination of their set, once again, the audiences reaction leaves The Handsome Family quite clear as to how they have been received. The answer is unanimous. They will be welcome back anytime.
Review: Chris Curtis
Photograph – Jason Creps