Round a hairpin turn
The wagon tumbled o'er
And down the jagged rocks
Bill fell with all I owned.

--- leaves a man stranded in a desert, only as his final night falls to be greeted by the epiphany of the title: the song of a hundred toads. "The Bottomless Hole" strikes an H. P. Lovecraft note, but Lovecraft with a difference: it seems it's -useful- to have a bottomless pit behind your barn, even if you end up obsessed with the urge to explore it.

Moving to New Mexico seems to have added some new, somewhat more upbeat "western" seeming rhythms and chord changes to Brett's music. There are occasional touches of Spanish guitars, and on one song even a trumpet. The musical saw on "24 Hour Store" is another instrumental highlight.


Back to their roots...in a way   October 30, 2003
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

Any Handsome Family album is worth your while. This is their first album since leaving Chicago and moving to the Southwest. The change is noticeable in the fact that they seemed to have gone back to simpler melodies and arrangements.Subject mater is still vitage stuff from this brilliant duo. Overall, it seems like an old fashioned Handsome Family album. Gets better with every listen. My current favorite is the haunting, "A Shadow Underneath." If you are already a fan, you won't be let down.


Beautiful Suprise   November 4, 2005
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

I came across the Handsome Family by way of an interview on National Radio(Radio New Zealand). I pulled into the motel car park dead tired after driving for 16 long hours, yet remained sitting in the car mesmerised by the strange and evocative music pouring into the car from the rain sodden night. Once in the motel room I logged onto Amazon and purchased Singing Bones.
The next morning I opened my eyes and watched the wardrobe sway around in a dreamlike fashion, much like the music I had heard the night before. Later on the news I discovered that I had experienced an earthquake. In the end it was my wife who claimed ownership of the CD, and she has played it constantly ever since and our 6yr old daughter knows the words to all the songs. What a great discovery, fresh pure music, greatly cherished by this family.


Some place not meant to be found   August 19, 2005
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Somber and majestic tales of the West written as if H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London and Manly Wade Wellman shared a wagon with the Donner Party between the last hopeful days of (that) Summer and the coming awareness of Winter's ordeal.

Spooky and uplifting simultaneously, the stories float through themes which evoke spirits both otherworldly (ghosts and dream visions),as well as the natural haunts of desolate, forlorn geography visited by wandering souls.

There is a strong "sense of place" within these twilight landscapes...the Handsome Family brings them to life. After all, these realms DO exist,...sometimes. somewheres. really.

Total CD time is 38:47 min.





Simple, Spare and Powerful   December 24, 2003
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

For me this is the most satisfying Handsome Family CD the Sparks' have yet released. Moving from Chicago to New Mexico seems to have broadened their unique, but sometimes claustrophic vision. If the lyric themes remain constant (and they do -- there are plenty of dead people singing), they are packaged in a consistent sound that could have been lifted from an old Marty Robbins record and speaks of space, solitude and often harsh beauty. Conspicuous desert imagery drives several cuts, including the wonderfully sad Gail with the Golden Hair, Far From Any Road and The Song of a Hundred Toads.

The Family's world is at once colored with our thousands of ordinary moments, inhabited by the collective experience of those who have preceded us on the planet (Fallen Peaches), and drawn to the alluring not-yet-known, that sense that there is another world just at the corner of your vision. Thus, in 24 Hour Store, ghosts open and close the automatic sliding doors. On The Bottomless Hole, Rennie gets off one of her best lyric turns, "My name I don't remember/Though I hail from Ohio/I had a wife and children/Good tires on my car...," as the singer's obsession leads him to, literally and with his wife's quite willing assistance, cut away all ties to earth's surface and tumble "in a claw-foot tub" through a pit with no end. And just in case after all this you have any remaining doubts that Handsome Family's vision is not exactly short-term, they very kindly make it explicit for you in their terrific cover of the spiritual Old Bones and, even more, the twin pieces If the World Should End in Fire and If the World Should End in Ice.