The British do eccentricity nicely enough, but if you want real, jaw-dropping weirdness, look to America. In their 10 years as the Handsome Family, Brett and Rennie Sparks have recorded six albums of country and folk whose roots reach through concrete and loamy earth, snaking around dark legends and skeletons from the old west.
The husband-and-wife duo have a few tales of their own: Brett spent two weeks in a mental hospital in 1995, writing a bible. Just before recording their fantastic new album Singing Bones, the pair moved from Chicago to Albuquerque, where Rennie now sees fewer ghosts than she used to.
Tonight the record's highlight comes early, The Bottomless Hole falling into the Queen's Hall's rapt pews. It's the story of a man who throws his rubbish down a hole in his back yard that never fills up, before letting himself fall into the earth's dark places, a juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic that stretches through the pair's lyrics of mountains, 24-hour stores, elevators and apocalypse.
Brett wears a blue shirt and crumpled trousers and drinks Stella from the can. His wife, in a white-tinged red skirt and black lace blouse, looks like she should be rendered in sepia. The time difference doesn't stop them bickering. "Maybe I'll be killed by puppies, get licked by their razor tongues," suggests Rennie, as her husband looks on in pantomime bemusement. "It could happen. I've got sensitive skin."
None of this strangeness would be interesting were the songs not so wonderfully addictive. It takes a while to acclimatise oneself to the Handsome Family world, in which high notes are frequent and heartfelt, bass lines plod before breaking into an occasional lope, and Brett's brother, occasional third member Darrell Sparks, taps his drumkit with restraint.
It's hard not to get sucked in. In a world in which alt-country seems to act primarily as an excuse for cool people to like stuff that sounds like Counting Crows, the Handsome Family's traditionally arranged tales of claustrophobia and wide open spaces feel distinctive, grotesque and strangely and rewardingly sweet.
· At the Rescue Rooms, Nottingham (0115-958 8484), tonight, then touring.
