Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69393 in Music
• Released on: 2006-06-13
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .14 pounds

From Amazon.com
Beginning with an image of cosmic apocalypse and ending with a cosmic joke about going nowhere (yet always having somewhere else to be), Brett and Rennie Sparks use their first album in three years, and their most beautiful and accessible since Through the Trees, to explore the magical and disturbing intersections between the human, natural, and spiritual worlds. Recorded at home in Albuquerque, the album unfolds like a country-folk operetta (mostly composed by Rennie) set in idyllic and mysterious locales: haunted suburbia, peaceful but slightly malevolent strip malls, confession-inspiring bowling alleys, and lovesick airports. When they move to the exotic location of a shipwrecked island on "After We Shot the Grizzly," they borrow from Bob Dylan's cryptic "Isis," and make the random, mythic violence their own. Small moments of ennui, whether feeding pigeons in New York or watching kids paint graffiti, reveal unpredictable and unsettling dreams, and the delicate Americana instrumentation only sounds quaint on the surface. French horns, droning bass notes, clippity-clop drums, pedal steel (from Stephen Dorocke of Freakwater), and musical saw (from David Coulter, who has worked with Tom Waits) give even the most macabre songs--not to mention Brett Sparks' Johnny-Cash-on-Thorazine vocals--a light, playful air of discovery and wonder. --Roy Kasten

Album Description
The Handsome Family (Rennie and Brett Sparks) can't ever seem to find it in them to pair lyrics like "When automatic sinks in airports no longer see your hands/Your great journey has begun" with music that reflects their desperate urban majesty. Last Days of Wonder, their seventh full-length collection of Midwest gothic country songs, does push the envelope a tad further than their previous six releases, as Brett has invented a myriad of new ways to manipulate his trusty home computer into a limitless extension of his own creativity, but even a musical saw can lose its backwoods luster when it's being hauled on the caboose of a three-chord train to midtempo Americanaville. That said, the Handsome Family's adherence to highly literate contemporary heartbreak within an old-timey framework is what made them stand out from the crowded sea of young Gram Parsons converts in the first place -- actually, they've always seemed more late-period Johnny Cash than Parsons -- so they've more than earned the right to rest on their laurels a bit, but one can't help but think that just a little bit more spice might have elevated all of these beautiful ideas out of the trappings of their now painfully insular song structures. ~ James Christopher Monger, Rovi