A Week With The Handsome Furs' "Plague Park": Day 1
21 June 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Amanda Walker
Handsome Furs is the band comprised of half of Wolf Parade and a girlfriend. Plague Park is their album. An album written by the guy from Wolf Parade who isn’t Spencer Krug, with the help of the aforementioned guy’s fiancee.
Their names are Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry, thank you very much. And the amount of pre-positioning, over-expectation, and clamoring for this, the next album in the saga that is Wolf Parade, handily throws itself (in a desperate, near-fatal fling) out from under the long shadow of that band and its other, over-productive vocalist.
Imagine clawing your own artistic path from the deep cave which has birthed other wildly innovative and still-underground-enough bands like Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. You are expected to make music different enough from your earlier exploits, avoid too many comparisons with your Wolf Parade alter-ego, and grow a healthy “side-project” from the expectedly less-than-fertile grounds where you huddle…the place that your far-away, necessarily divergent path has taken you: lost under a canopy of pines, on a bed of dead needles.
Plague Park pulls no punches. It’s an album of sterile, emotionless electro-tones borne of some Casio-keyboard beats complete with factory programmed break-downs used sparingly, but accordingly. This would be no-wave, at its most cloying, were it not for the discordant warmth of the keyboards and Boeckner’s incalculable, asymmetric vocals.
The album sounds as if were an exhaustive birth after days of agonizing labor, under commercial-grade, fluorescent lights. The miracle of life in an operating room, behind a closed door from the hospital’s empty hallway, a linoleum floor gleaming like too-white teeth, crisp white sheets lie untouched on errant gurneys, the gleam of the edge of a scalpel remains a wicked reminder of its untapped potential.
The music all seems to happen in the sterility of this vacant hallway, even the keyboards are subjected to the almost unlistenable, echo-ey quality of impending doom. For the under-indulged ascetic in all of us, Plague Park is an album that aches perfectly like a mild arthritis.
Dan Boeckner sounds, at times, like a man trapped, hopelessly and forever, at the bottom of the well that he knows will be his final resting place. The threatening boom of the drum machine, the portent of danger in the gently hysterical guitar, all of the lyrics which might point to the contrary cannot convince us otherwise: there is death and decay happening here. Just look at the title.
Remember: this is only day #1, and I don’t know whether a first listen like this can hold up to repeats, but initial instinct is to crown this album as the unlikely successor to PJ Harvey’s dangerously underrated Is This Desire?
Either way Boeckner has effectively made an album which rivals his main project in emotional outpouring and in artistic risk. This is an album about the death of domestication, the loss in a relationship rather than the love in it…and still I have to check the liner notes for his fiancee’s name. Alexei something.
Plague Park leaves you wondering less and less about what that Spencer guy was up to after all.
Nice to see a little friendly competition, no?
that sentence should read: “half of the vocal contingent of wolf parade”.
thanks for pointing that out, william.
apologies for the oversight. apologies to the rest of the band. apologies to the…
Sounds like these guys have a unique sound. Nice review.
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“half of Wolf Parade”
Those other guys in the band who don’t sing aren’t part of the band though, right?