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
Product 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.