The Waltons they ain't

They met over a tambourine and a bottle of tequila ... now Brett and Rennie Sparks have made an album celebrating 20 years of marriage. They talk music and married life to Amy Fleming of The Guardian.

Who would you rather work with than someone you love?" asks Rennie Sparks, plainly. When she puts it like that, placing all your eggs - creative, professional and personal - in one basket sounds like a no-brainer. "Maybe," adds her husband Brett, smirking, "before everyone gets married, they should be forced to write a song together, to make a record and go on tour together." If you can do all that without falling out, you can safely assume that you are a highly compatible couple.

To read more about The Handsome Family and their life together as a couple and as bandmates, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/23/handsome-family-interivew-folk-music Click Here to Read More..

"Shame On The Soul" is one of Q's 50 Essential Trackes

Speck Mounatin--Chicagoan's second helping of superior dream-pop.
If, as some reckon, a full-blown shoegazing revival is imminent, Speck Mountain have plenty going for them. In fact, Marie-Claire Balabanian's lonesome vocals, the languid pacing and fuzzy, opiated atmosphere their songs generate make them the closest thing there’s been to Mazzy Star for a long time. Though Balabanian and partner Karl Briedrick prefer to call what they do "ambient soul", what really matters is that they do it beautifully. Curtain-raiser "Shame On The Soul's" lightly-fingered tambourine, churchy organ swells and shards of acid-etched guitar instantly set the dreamy mood. Never straying far thereafter, it all makes for a heavily addictive, comfortably numbing kind of experience.—Peter Kane Click Here to Read More..

MOJO--LA meets Detroit, they record in Chicago and sound like the Delta.

Speck Mountain core members Karl Briedrick (guitar) and Marie-Claire Balabanian (vocals) call their sound "ambient soul." The "soul" bit is no empty boast; their echoey shimmer has the ghostly quality of mist on the bayou...Balabanian intones fetchingly, like Patti Smith in slowmo.--Phil Sutcliffe Click Here to Read More..

KEXP names "Some Sweet Relief" the Song of the Day

Today’s featured selection, chosen by Morning Show host John Richards, is “Some Sweet Relief” by Speck Mountain from the 2009 album Some Sweet Relief on Carrot Top Records. Speck Mountain consciously avoids the extremes of shoegaze and folk, instead cherry-picking each school’s finest qualities and bolting them together with the sincerity and richness of Motor City soul, creating oscillating texture grounded in human truths and softening reality’s sharp corners with warmth and sonic space...they will send you searching for your headphones, closing your eyes and sinking into the floor. Some sweet relief indeed. Click Here to Read More..

Speck Mountain is the Word

Word Magazine
Speck Mountain-Wherein alt.country square dances with psychedelic gospel
Musical collision could just be the last refuge of the indolent scoundrel, yet occasionally something genuinely thrilling can squeeze out between the cracks of genre paving stones so willfully tossed around. Speck Mountain’s Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian achieve an absorbing alchemy on their second album, compiling country, gospel, shoegazing, ambient and psychedelic sounds into what we could foolishly call a sonic Battenberg. In spirit and mood, these nine careful, sighing, unfolding tracks may on the surface call to mind Cat Power (Backsliding), Throwing Muses (the title track), Dusty In Memphis (I Feel Eternal) or mid-period Lambchop (Twinlines); but it’s the repetition of lethargic chords, beaten out over sleepy and minimal percussion, that delivers the music into a more spectral plane. Balabanian’s tired and pained voice is their trump card and sparse, whispered musical arrangement allows her the space to glide, a torch singer in an emotional power cut. —Eamonn Forde Click Here to Read More..

The Handsome Family Announces West Coast Tour in July

7/14 Seattle at Tractor Tavern
7/15 Vancouver at the Biltmore
7/16-7/19 Dawson City Music Festival
7/21 Portland at Doug Fir
7/23 San Francisco at Bottom of the Hill
7/24 Santa Cruz at the Crepe Place
7/25 Los Angeles at Spaceland
7/26 Los Angeles at McCabe's
7/27 San Diego at Casbah
7/29 Tucson at the Congress Click Here to Read More..

Ten Tips to Increase Media Exposure

Look we get it. It's tough out there. So we thought it was time we lent a little insight on how to increase exposure in the media world. Check out the article written for Musician's Atlas April Newsletter, Atlas Plugged at http://www.musiciansatlas.com/newsletter/apr09/mediaexposure.asp Click Here to Read More..

Speck Mountain Takes the Stage with NPR's Second Stage

While the duo's debut release, Summer Above, has more of an innocent vibe, their newest album, Some Sweet Relief is more textured and mysterious than its predecessor and begs to be unpacked...The resulting album is dreamy, impressionistic, and ambient. Like sunlight shining through a gauzy curtain, Balabanian's rich vocals are simultaneously hazy, distant and piercing.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103215670 Click Here to Read More..

Pitchfork Digs The Handsome Family

Stephen Deusner of Pitchfork says the Handsome Family's "new songs are so full of woodsy imagery that they make Neko Case seem urbane...a testament both to Rennie's skillful threading of words into images and Brett's sensitive translation of words on a page into vocals."
Rather than dwell on country gothic doom and despair, they've recorded all manner of love songs-- odes to sex, devotion, redemption, sacrifice, New Mexico, and more sex-- that are only slightly sunnier than their usual fare. But don't expect corny sentiments even from a song called "Love Is Like".
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12878-honey-moon/ Click Here to Read More..

Tim Hinely BLURTS About Honey Moon

Since the release of their debut record in 1995 (Odessa) the Handsome Family (married couple Brett and Rennie Sparks) have explored the depths of the human soul with songs about drifters, murderers, and even Aunt Barbara "who went crazy in the 70's, wrote poems to Jimmy Carter but forgot to feed her kids" (from "Lake Geneva on 1996's Milk and Scissors) and on this, record #8, they do not disappoint. This record was written to celebrate their 20 years of marriage and as someone who has been married for not even half that long I toast them for their longevity - and the music, too. The band's music has been called Gothic Americana and that seems as good a place to start as any, Brett writes the music and sings most of the sings while Rennie writes the lyrics (she doesn't forget the dark humor) and they have rounded up a batch of terrific musicians in their adopted hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico (where they moved to several years ago after many years in Chicago).

The songs on Honey Moon are just a gorgeously haunting as anything they have done previously. The opener "Linger, Let Me Linger" adds some lovely cello to the proceedings (which already include Brett's rich baritone) while "Little Sparrows' adds some zippy pedal steel which gives it a completely different feel. "When You Whispered" is pure Carter Family country and the nearly perfect, "A Thousand Diamond Rings" is the record's best song (that has a murky, Calexico-ish feel to it but these guys were doing this stuff long before Calexico). Yet another terrific chapter in a book that I hope these guys never finish.

Click Here to Read More..