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The gothic/country sometime duo (they sometimes have up to six people on stage) The Handsome Family are the husband and wife team of Brett and Rennie Sparks from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not much can be found about the beginning of The Handsome Family other that their discography that says their first album came out in May of 1996. Their latest album is called The Last Days of Wonder and came out last year in June.

The music from their latest release is somber and a little depressing but they also tell compelling stories with their lyrics, stories like the song Tesla’s Hotel Room which is finds Nikola Tesla in his New Yorker Hotel room fantasizing about death rays and wireless telephones. All the time in Airports is either the story of a ghostly apparition stuck in an airport trying, but never succeeding, to reach their destination or is about the degree facelessness of the people in airports that leaves everyone undistinguishable.

Hunter Green is a story about hunting, it starts out with someone out hunting a deer and as they fire a shot they see their true love fall, and as they carry the body to the road and into the moonlight it is the deer they are carrying, the next verse is the hunter is out fishing but instead of a fish the hunter pulls their true love out of the water, but again as the hunter lays the body down in the boat it is the fish. The last verse the hunter sees a boar rushing at him but instead of raising his gun to shoot he hesitates and as he falls he feels the lips of his true love kissing him.

The Last Days of Wonder is an album that is inspired by today’s society that seems to be advancing so much technologically that we are forgetting the wonders of life, the things we can’t see. We are becoming cynical and jaded and because we can’t touch or see something we are leaning toward disbelief.