ON her tour blog for The Guardian's Culture Vulture website, The Handsome Family's Rennie Sparks says she judges the audience by whether they laugh at the first chorus of a new song called After We Shot The Grizzly.

Under the Band Room fairy lights, she and husband Brett leave that testing moment until the 17th and last song of their set.

Given their professed love affair with this moorland shack, they must have been confident of the response to the grizzly revelation: "Yes, Mary, I found a human skull."

The packed hall did indeed laugh, and not for the first time on a night when Brett, necking liquid refreshment between songs, and Rennie, nursing a heavy cold, sparred with black-humoured wit throughout.

On their third visit to the Band Room the first in 1999 was recalled in a framed poster behind them the New Mexico duo put the quirky into Albuquerque, being as weird and wonderful, as mysterious and monster-fixated as ever.

All the more so for the deadpan presence of Steve Dorocke on lap steel, violin and mandolin, as he mirrored the marriage of ancient and modern in Rennie's lyrics with his gothic country counter to the clinical click of the drum machine.

At one point, Rennie talked of the miracle of a duck and its chicks safely passing under the wheels of a car "but this song is about the other ducks".

We laughed again; the darkly comic Handsome Family have that effect.