handsome fur by amanda

A Week With Handsome Furs' "Plague Park": Day 5

18 July 2007
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Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Amanda Walker

This album is a too heavy frame hung on a wall. The wall is brittle plaster. The nail holding the frame is too weak for the hanging. The plaster doesn’t crumble, the nail doesn’t succumb, nothing falls on the floor with the satisfying shatter of glass. Plague Park is an album of tension with no release. A rubber band stretched to its limit, and then some. No sudden snap.

Building tension effortlessly is the gift of the creators. Boeckner and Perry put rural and urban worlds at odds. Life and death feels as if it is always on the line. As an experiment in textural, accessible art-rock, they succeed admirably.

The question remains: is an album which builds to a climax it never achieves considered musically successful if its aim is to avoid a soaring, shiver-inducing moment of realization? As an art-form, absolutely. However, I find myself actively listening now only because I know I must, not because the music, at this point demands it. I know not to expect average satisfaction from the music here, but rather to allow the songs to toy with my expectations, and the album does reward, albeit slowly. Lyrically and musically the songs have an eerie ability to build and collapse onto themselves., which is both unnerving and, in its unique way, ingenious.

Handsome Furs’ intentionally lo-fi debut belies incredible depth through the band’s approach to songwriting, relaxing the rules of verse-chorus-verse and often settling on what can at its worst sound like an endless monologue, and at its best the distant war chant of a doomed army.

There is beauty in the album, but if you don’t listen closely, you will miss the best of it.

Sub Pop Records

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*

I’ve had an unrelenting obsession with Plague Park for the past couple of months – not because of the melodies but because of the colors, rhythms and lyrics. It’s puzzling to me how the album can combine resigned apathy with ecstatic frustration so effortlessly. I thoroughly enjoyed your review. It’s visceral and eloquent.

marlene | 1 August 2007

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