HANDSOME FURS - "PLAGUE PARK"

Great to Highly Recommended

“I will return/ to a dead and rural town/ I’ve got some friends there/ wheels just spinning in the ground” Dan Boeckner wails in Springsteenian stutter over the minimal repetition of clipped organ, electric guitar, and a mix of electronic and kit drums on “Dead + Rural”, a song that anchors the second half of the excellent Victorian surrealist fever dream that is the Handsome Furs first full length album “Plague Park”. Dan and fiancée/writing partner Alexei Perry explore similar dissatisfactions and attractions to both the rural and the urban, to the natural and the manufactured, and their mutual displacement and homelessness throughout the 9 tracks on “Plague Park”. There is a dual repulsion away from the place or point of view they sing from, be it bucolic or metropolitan, and longing for the opposite place, creating a restless tension throughout the album that is manifest in both the lyrics and arrangements: electronic collides with acoustic, skyscrapers with religious symbols, hard earned sentiment with world weary pleas on what I discovered to be an initially dark, but ultimately satisfyingly complete album.

I say initially dark because as the title of the album, which comes from a park in Helsinki (a place that fittingly experiences a month with little or no daylight) that was built atop a mass grave for 17th century plague victims, comes across as sinister, further exploration reveals more poignant observations hidden below the murky exterior (the park is the site of Helsinki’s largest annual celebrations). There is a video out for their song “Dumb Animals” that you can look up on YouTube, and which is representatively dark, feverish, and Lynchian, yet listening to “Plague Park” I can’t help thinking that this band would be perfect to score a clay-mation Jan Svankmeyer film; with their harmonious investigations of the distinction between the organic and the mechanic and their equally grim and dreamlike approaches to it (and because their album cover reminds me so much of his short films).

Handsome Furs may not have the urgency and immediacy of Wolf Parade, nor the epic whirlwind heat of Frog Eyes, nor the timelessness or raw emotion of Sunset Rubdown, but it is impossible to deny them either gravity or pathos and they stand tall in their indie rock family tree, leaning heavily on minimalist repetition, dense electronics, and Boeckner’s distinctive voice which sounds like a cross between Beck and Kurt Cobain. It probably isn’t fair to compare Handsome Furs to these other bands except for the fact that Boeckner is indirectly related to them all. Nor is it fair to compare this album to Thom Yorke’s “Eraser” album which came out this time last year, but I think that “Plague Park” is ultimately a much more complete, human, successful, side project foray into dark, electronic based meditations than the Radiohead leader’s and that is certainly no small feat.

My favorite tracks on Plague Park are the simplest: “Sing! Captian”, “Snakes On The Ladder” (with its Ennio Morricone aping snare and baritone build), and “Handsome Furs Hate This City”. “Dead + Rural” is another standout track apparently based on the Liars’ song “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack” which they covered as they were just starting to do shows. The single “What We Had” is a great slice of macabre built on a pulsing factory-line drum beat and the same jangly guitar riffs that made Wolf Parade so popular.

I have to believe that the sense of longing that thematically ties all of the songs on “Plague Park” together must stem from restlessness and maybe a fear of stopping or, God forbid, going backwards that Dan and Alexei must feel as they move between rural and urban environments with their various bands, but I believe it is the same fear that makes Boeckner so productive. “Plague Park” is an excellent debut and I recommend it to fans of Wolf Parade, to anyone who has more than one home, and those who aren’t afraid of the carnal ruminations that Handsome Furs might bring to the table.