Track Listing

1. What We Had
2. Hearts Of Iron
3. Handsome Furs Hate This City
4. Snakes On The Ladder
5. Cannot Get Started
6. Sing! Captain
7. Dead + Rural
8. Dumb Animals
9. Radio's Hot Sun, The

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77474 in Music
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2007-05-22
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .12 pounds

Album Description
Dark and minimal while noisy and earnest, the point of this duo was to be as sparse and repetitive as possible with the help of little more than vocals, guitars, and a drum machine. Disenchanted vocals thinly resonate while cloaked in a frenzied undertone of fear and uncertainty, all punctuated by bare drum machine beats. Their debut is a record of melancholic tendency and heartfelt desire; a stripped down symphony relegated between city and country, and made for ears of either side.

Amazon.com
Fans of Death Cab for Cutie will remember how the Postal Service seemed to put Ben Gibbard on a cloud of keyboards, away from the grit of Death Cab's guitars and drums, making the singer seem almost ethereal. With Handsome Furs, you have a similar musical concept, pairing Wolf Parade singer Dan Boeckner with Alexei Perry (as Gibbard did with Jimmy Tamborello), but the effect is stunningly different. Here, Boeckner isn't calmed down by the spare synthetics and drum machines. Instead, he's dystopian in his lo-fi bellow, ricocheting between electro-drums with mid-tempo guitars either strummed acoustically (as on "Snakes on the Ladder," awash in synths and yet clattering) or laying down a thick-set distortion that's a fine foil for all the electronics. The nine tracks run a tad samey-same, but that's at least part of their charm. They and assert Boeckner anew as a prescient, skeptical voice, coarsely toned and draped in machine-sounding music even as he inveighs against the post-modern world--technology and urban living and traffic and so on. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews

A Parade of Their Own (4 1/2 stars)
I really like the Wolf Parade album, but Handsome Furs, with their minor variations on the same sound, arguably have the better album. Plague Park might not have a song as fantastic as "I'll Believe in Anything" or "Dinner Bells", but I think it's consistently very good throughout, and I can't say the same for Apologies to the Queen Mary. Both bands are making some of the best indie rock around, and I look forward to hearing more from these guys.

Retro and modern at the same time
With vocals that recall greats like Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunneymen, Richard Ashcroft and Peter Murphy, this CD has a lot of things I love. Mostly the atonal 80's synth and guitar mixture and distinct vocal sound. Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade and his fiancée Alexei Perry formed Handsome Furs as a side project for fun. Even though they only had a few songs, they were offered a tour. 9 songs later they gave birth to Plague Park. The result is a syncopation of sensory bliss. My personal pick is Snakes on the Ladder. With it's electrostatic beat and twisted "music box" guitar line it weaves an ethereal web of passion as a bed for Boeckner's voice. Ramping up into a sort of marching drum beat and guitar strum it then falls back for the refrain in almost angelic form. Cannot get started is probably an indy rocker's wet dream. Pulsing beats and catchy phrasing let us all know this is a song to play on those bleary-eyed mornings when you are having trouble getting going.
I just can't listen to this CD enough. I wish there was a second album already. I can only hope there is a second and that Boeckner doesn't leave Hansome Furs behind to move on to a new side project.
Buy it today!

I still prefer Wolf Parade and Modest Mouse
I bought this because I read about it in Elle magazine. I love Wolf Parade and Modest Mouse, and some of the same artists were involved with this. The layering of percussive sounds and vocals is rich, but the mood, on the whole, is darker than I expected.