Review:
'HANDSOME FAMILY, THE/ McCORMACK, BARRY'
'Cork, Crane Lane Theatre, 28th March 2015'
- Genre: 'Alt/Country'
|
Our Rating:
|
|
Rewind around fifteen years and you’d find W&H watching dark Chicagoan husband and wife country duo The Handsome Family headlining at Cork’s fondly-remembered, but now long-gone Lobby Bar.
Supporting that night was one BARRY McCORMACK; an erudite Dublin singer/songwriter with a penchant for idiosyncratic vignettes. In all honesty, he didn’t make our earth move, but he was pleasant enough. Now, all this time later, he’s recorded five albums, picked up a decent amount of positive press and is still onstage without a soundcheck. The support act’s slot is, indeed, rarely a happy one.
Still, the crowds are bigger these days and tonight McCormack’s got a packed, attentive room to win over. In this kind of situation, it could mean great exposure for a struggling performer slogging around and trying to make an impression or else it could mean being thrown to the lions. So which way will he jump?
Thankfully, McCormack takes the former option. He’s here touting his recent LP ‘Cut-Throat Lane’ and takes the bull by the horns, opening with the title track, an ode to a particularly dark Dublin thoroughfare next door to what was once known as Murderer’s Lane, apparently.
It’s a good start; vivid and resonant, and it sets the tone for most of what follows. Idiosyncratic tunes about the quirks of the human condition such as ‘Never Leave The House’, ‘I Remember Kent Station’ (about coming second best in a whisky-fuelled nocturnal fight with some furniture) and the wry ‘Waiting For Joe’ are McCormack’s primary stock in trade and he does what he does with aplomb.
He’s also learnt a few useful tricks for turning a potentially hostile audience; closing with a song possibly called ‘Yer Man Upstairs’: a murderous rewrite of sorts of the headliners’ ‘The Woman Downstairs’ but set in Dublin’s Foley Street. He leaves the stage to hearty, well-earned applause and – at least on this evidence – deserves a chance on stages of this size on his own terms.
If this review was being written two years back, when critically-acclaimed purveyors of offbeat, ultra-fatalistic Americana THE HANDSOME FAMILY released their last LP, ‘Wilderness’, you could just as easily say little had changed in their world either. Brett and Rennie Sparks may have swapped windy, urban Chicago for arid, sunkissed New Mexico, but they’d fallen into a cycle of releasing a critically-lauded LP every two or three years and seemed to have reached a comfortable level which was apparently impervious to fluctuation.
Then, in 2014, former Elvis Costello collaborator T-Bone Burnett stepped in; choosing to use the Sparks’ mariachi-tinged ‘Far From Any Road’ for HBO’s popular TV crime drama ‘True Detective’: the result of which being that all of a sudden The Handsome Family have stepped up to playing larger venues and enjoying something akin to mainstream attention.
It isn’t that they don’t deserve it, mind. Even if you’ve only intermittently tuned in here over the past decade or more, you’ll probably have caught W&H bigging them up and they also richly deserve a sizeable following in this part of the world. After all, for 15 years or more, they’ve assiduously toured in Ireland and toured properly too; not just Dublin and Belfast but frequently getting into the cobwebbed corners of the country as well.
All that aside, the last time W&H caught one of Brett and Rennie’s shows, at the 2010 Skibbereen SXSW Festival, they sounded unusually jaded; so much so that one punter actually went to sleep in an armchair in front of the stage.
|
There’s no chance of a repeat of that scenario tonight, however. In front of this sold-out crowd, Brett and Rennie – and ceaselessly inventive touring drummer Jason Todd – rise to the occasion and then some. Indeed, this Cork gigs (the first of two nights concluding their lengthy UK and Ireland tour) might just rank as the best show we’ve ever seen them perform.
Advance reports have been suggesting the Sparks’ next LP will be based around a theme of colours and a couple of newly-minted tracks suggest this may be the case. Introducing a tune apparently called ‘Gold’, Rennie says “this is a song about getting shot in the guts…it’s the sound of Albuquerque.” The song itself (which rocks harder than most things Handsome) features comfortingly fatalistic lyrics such as “lying in the weeds with a bullet in my guts/ watching dollar bills flyin’ away in the dust” and it suggests the band’s ideas of New Mexico’s colour palette certainly have little in common with the landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Primarily, though, tonight’s celebratory set leans heavily on career highlights. The earthy, stomping ‘Loneliness Of Magnets’ from 2009’s ‘Honeymoon’ is the only other new-ish tune, but the back catalogue is ransacked with relish, with songs such as ‘The Bottomless Hole’ and ‘Whitehaven’ attacked with gusto and even the apparently done-to-death stuff (‘So Much Wine’; a Low-esque reinvention of ‘The Sad Milkman’ with bizarre Spanish vocal interjections from Brett) sounding impressively box fresh.
The set’s impeccably paced with the inevitable ‘Far From Any Road’ (featuring Todd’s dramatic drum rolls offsetting the lack of brass) cueing up a stellar home strait including ‘The Giant Of Illinois’, a rare – and welcome – outing for ‘Milk & Scissors’ highlight ‘The Dutch Boy’ and a superb version of ‘Weightless Again’ with Todd replicating the record’s melodica part on a tinkly glockenspiel and never once missing a beat.
Mr & Mrs Sparks are in fine form all evening; their suitably droll repartee involving everything from miniature horses to a celebration the band’s new fanbase and Spotify users in Iran. They wrapped things up in style with a two-song encore featuring ‘My Sister’s Tiny Hands’ and a surprisingly tender’ n’ touching ‘Don’t Be Scared’.
Loose Music online
The Handsome Family online
Barry McCormack online
|
| |
author: Tim Peacock/ Photo: Kate Fox
|
[Show all reviews for this Artist]
|
READERS COMMENTS
10 comments still available (max 10)
[Click here to add your own comments]
There are currently no comments...
----------
|
|
The Handsome Family
Barry McCormack
|
 |
