The Handsome Family Australian Tour 2013 Announce Dates and Venues

The Handsome Family Australian Tour 2013 has been announced as the husband and wife folkies head back to Australia this October.

Having been announced as part of the Melbourne Festival 2013 lineup overnight, The Handsome Family – the matrimonial songwriting collaboration between Brett and Rennie Sparks – have compounded their Melbourne appearance at the annual arts and music festival with national dates, taking in Sydney, a free show at Manly, Brisbane, and Adelaide.

The Handsome Family craft intense, highly descriptive music full of meticulously-researched narrative and exhilarating musical re-imaginings of everything from Appalacian holler, psychedelic rock, Tin Pan Alley and medieval ballad. Of course you don’t have to be a music historian to love these songs.

They are full of romantic longing for nature’s mysterious beauty and the tiny wonders of everyday life. They pair sweet melody with sad harmony, love poetry with dark beats. This is music that makes you shiver and cry, but also makes you happy to be alive.

May, 2013 brought the release of The Handsome Family’s Wilderness, a record about animals (frogs, flies, wildebeest, octopuses, lizards…), but in lyricist Rennie Sparks’ hands the wonders of nature are intertwined with true stories of Stephen Foster’s death in a Bowery flophouse, General Custer’s shiny boots as he lay dead on a Montana prairie and the capture of Mary Sweeney, the Wisconsin Window Smasher of 1896.

There are also tall tales of the octopus’ hypnotic sea-dance, the frenzied mayhem of a town afflicted by a golden lizard’s bite and an enormous mansion full of screeching owls. Musically you’ll hear everything from parlour ballads to overdriven guitars, trilling mandolin and claw-hammer banjo, but also beautiful bells, intricate seven-part harmonies, pedal steel and elemental rock ’n roll.

Witness The Handsome Family Australia Tour 2013 as it treks the country this October.