Handsome Furs
Face Control
Sub Pop
By Jose Fritz
When I listened to the first Handsome Furs first album, Plague Park, I understood it to be a somber fruit fly. It was somber without ever being homogenous or dull; it was a side project. It was a fleeting set of ideas recorded and presented to us to be seen to be heard and observed and then forgotten in the quickly passing wake of everything else. A record can be great just as a band can be great, but if they are only great once they become a cultural footnote in the perpetually rolling 5-minute window of whatever contemporary music is right now.
For Dan Boeckner, the Handsome Furs side project could have been a footnote. He has a successful steady gig as the frontman for Wolf Parade. Frontmen don’t need side projects generally, that’s the primæ noctis of the frontman. Though it’s not without precedence, Chk Chk Chk (er, !!!,) has gone through three vocalists, Faith No More two vocalists; the list goes on. They all seem to wander off to other gigs. This aberration does have a raison d'être: the Handsome Furs consist of Mr. Boeckner and his wife Alexei Perry. But she’s no frontispiece; she’s a genuine synth-pounding, drum-programming co-conspirator. (How do all the fugly rockers get the hot babes?)
Starting from that distant point, further back than even 5-minutes ago, Handsome Furs have shed their similarity to Death Cab For Cutie, and delved deeper into a world of Raymond Scott’s Electronium. The fuzzy drum loops sound more like products of vintage sequencers than modern samplers. In brief moments some songs evokes a 1980s pop ethos but the dirty guitar tones dispel that awkward feeling. “Evangeline” starts out with a drum beat straight out of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, but when the lead guitar line comes in the band morphs into We Ragazzi— squawking angular guitars and all. The transition is seamless and eloquent. The rest of the record is no less so.
In contrast, Face Control isn’t as murky as Plague Park, it builds on its stark predecessor. The song “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” lands somewhere between Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” and the eponymous “Hey Bo Diddly” building itself around the century old marching chant “I don’t know but I’ve been told.” For the first time ever I know that Malcolm MacLaren is a fraud in every way. Handsome Furs return this classic riff to the rightful area of rock.
The album has all the gravitas of Dominique Grange. It’s homage to the death or privacy through monitoring and surveillance, both from big brother and little brother and the iron heel too I suppose. Their eastern Bloc references are a thin allusion to our domestic situation. I don’t just respect the message I endorse it. It’s only paranoia if they’re not watching and as the ACLU has explained they most certainly are watching and listening. In other words the fucking Canadians are right: not only is the man listening, he’s listening to you and listening to me and listening to the Handsome Furs. The man is even listening to me listening to the Handsome Furs. That’s how they find new bands: spying on everyday Americans while they innocently enjoy their indie rock in the privacy of their own bucolic homes.
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