New feature for the Santa Cruz Weekly on the Handsome Family:

MANY ARTISTS have explored the dark recesses of the American id, but few have wrung such effortless beauty from it as the Handsome Family. Since 1995, the married duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks has found gold in the strange, the mundane and the macabre. Specializing in folk, bluegrass and country delivered at a stately pace, the band has become known for songs examining the existential cruelty of the natural world and the sorrows of an ill-spent life, and bone-chilling murder ballads. But on the occasion of their 20th wedding anniversary, the two have turned toward territory they’ve rarely explored: the redemptive power of love.

Read it here