Singing Bones

Anyway agree with the brilliance of The Bottomless Hole? The man is transfixed by this huge sink hole behind his barn, and it grabs his mind and won’t let go. He then asks his wife to him lower him into the hole to test its bottom. He then cuts the ropes—and won’t believe it’s a bottomless hole until he hits the bottom. If anyone else here has dealt with any sort of addiction, this hits pretty hard. The enabling wife, the refusal to believe in “a bottom” until one hits it. Brilliant.

This is so fresh and different...dark but not melancholy...I have listened for hours this summer lying out in the sun. Great chill music.

These folk-songs from the deep black back country behind the trailer park tell mini-sagas of death, depravity, and other dire doings, sung by the gaunt baritone of Johnny Cash's ghost. A voyage through a ghost-ridden, dream-daubed landscape is promised from the get-go, by the first line of the first song, "The Forgotten Lake": "Come with me to the forgotten lake / Where covered wagons and the wings of missing planes / Float between black fish underneath the velvet waves / Strange lights fly across the rocky beach / Girls in white nightgowns wander barefoot in their sleep / And the veins of dreams wind in circles round their feet." All the songs on this album boast a characteristic surealist imagery (written by Rennie Sparks), backed by slide guitar, banjo, horns, jazz kit, and acoustic guitar. Some of the songs have a rousing men's choir (actually baritone Brett Sparks' voice multi-tracked) singing in favor of a world frozen in ice. My favorite songs are "The Bottomless Hole," about a man who discovers a sinkhole behind his trailer and decides to plumb its depth, finding his apotheosis there; and "Far From Any Road," a mid-tempo Latin number that Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra would be proud to cover in Heaven. If you like the Silver John stories of Manley Wade Wellman ("The Bottomless Hole" definitely owes a debt to his collection "Who's Afraid Of The Devil?"), then you will love the Handsome Family.