The Handsome Family @ RNCM, Manchester, 22 Feb

This far into their career – and they’ve been going for nearly a quarter of a century by now – The Handsome Family have earned the right for their fans to accept them as they are, foibles and all. Anybody who’s seen them play in the past or even just taken a cursory glance across their Twitter feed will know that their voracious appetite for finding the darkly surreal in their surroundings is by no means limited just to their lyrics.

Husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks spend the first five minutes between taking the stage – or, rather, the floor in the RNCM’s Concert Hall, in which the crowd bear down on the band rather than the other way around – chatting idly with the audience about missed medication, backstage knife-wielding and the heroic amount of Lemsip they’d both ingested as they fought off mid-tour lurgy.

The duo’s twisted take on Americana earned them a cult following long ago in the UK but it’s one that expanded considerably three years ago when their 2003 track Far From Any Road was plucked from obscurity to be used as the theme tune for the first season of True Detective – alright, alright, alright! Last year, they released their first album since that extrapolation of their audience in the form of Unseen, and it was one that certainly refused to play around with their tried-and-true formula in the wake of their unlikely flirtation with the mainstream.

Instead, it was actually a slightly disappointing retread of what had gone before, despite an overarching lyrical concept that zeroed in on nature in a more focused manner than ever before. It doesn’t dominate proceedings tonight, anyway, with the set covering most periods of the Handsome Family catalogue and offering a interesting summary of how their sound has diversified over the years. There’s straight-up country – So Much Wine, Weightless Again – and atmospheric, off-kilter folk – see the scraping percussion on My Sister’s Tiny Hands, or the inescapable nervousness of Bottomless Hole.

All of this is punctuated by charmingly offbeat stage banter, although the formal nature of the seated venue inherently discourages much back-and-forth between crowd and band. The presence of a backing band in the form of drummer Jason Toth and multi-instrumentalist Alex McMahon allows for some reinterpretation of material new and old, with the latter especially prominent; he leans much too heavily on the lap steel for Your Great Journey, but leads the band in an exhilaratingly revamped version of Unseen’s King of Dust to close the main set. 

There’s a lack of evenness, in that respect, that makes the show feel a bit less steady than the band’s last couple of outings in town, and it’s unfortunate that, as was the case at the Martin Harris Centre in 2015, the stuffy choice of venue stultifies the audience interaction that was such a joyous part of 2014’s turn at Gorilla. A good thing, then, that Mr and Mrs Sparks have such deep reserves of ramshackle charm to draw from.