Pitchfork

Many Americans historically moved West to seek wealth, prosperity, and adventure. More recently, people made the shift to the clean air, open space, and lack of humidity of Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California for improved health. But whatever the reasons that The Handsome Family, the avant-country husband/wife duo of Rennie and Brett Sparks, had for picking up stakes in Chicago and relocating to Albuquerque, it hasn't seemed to affect the dark humor or morbidity of their gothic Americana music. Like most of their work, Signing Bones, the band's sixth album, is another collection of tales of madness, thoughts of suicide, and acts of brutality and murder.

Which isn't to say that Singing Bones doesn't sound as if it was informed by their change in geography. Like their best album to date, 1998's Through the Trees-- which was peppered by lyrical references to Chicago's stool bums, long, wide avenues, and Wisconsin weekend "getaways"-- Signing Bones seems to echo the wide-open space and endless skies of the Southwest.

In a way, then, this is the band's most beautiful record, an expertly arranged blend of their acoustic old school country augmented by pedal steel guitar and bowed saws and sometimes colored by elements of mariachi, gospel, and rural folk. Rather than the airy, light sounds of their recent In the Air and Twilight, the new record has a spacious, almost minimalist sound that seems to echo with the sound of the nominal ghosts. Departed friends and lovers, the weight of history, and personal demons all seem channeled by the Sparks. From the apparitions that haunt the aisles of the "24-Hour Store" to the stench of death in "Far From the Road" to the sense of resignation that accompanies loss in both "The Bottomless Hole" and "Gail with the Golden Hair", ruin and decay-- spiritual, mental, and physical-- are central themes of the record.

Maybe it's the clean air, but the Sparks are in better voice than ever before, too. Brett's rich baritone-- which also shined while voicing feelings of claustrophobia, personal insignificance, and mental breakdown on Through The Trees and Milk and Scissors-- is better suited for these lush, spacious arrangements than it was for the band's most recent work or its roots-rock beginnings. Their harmonies, too, have improved dramatically, with Rennie now favoring a wavering falsetto rather than her typical affected, sometimes abrasive, and potentially off-putting growl.

Morbid but still melodic, the sharp imagery and deft storytelling of Rennie's lyrics set her apart from most of the depressive, post-Plath acoustic pluckers and bores with which the band often is lumped in. And both her sense of fractured romanticism and tangible grasp of loss and consequence make her writing effortlessly better than the emotive types parading in the punk dives for whom pain and discomfort seems bandied about as fashion or a calling card. It's not, of course-- it's private and difficult to grasp, an unseen specter like the ghosts that haunt this record.