HANDSOME FURS
Face Control
(Sub Pop)
By Kimberly Chun
Suicide-al synths haunt Handsome Furs’ Face Control like a spectral presence, humming almost inaudibly in the background of empty airport lounges, digital fingerprints barely visible in the tour snaps of cigarette burn holes and morning-afters. That sound is one way to map the sleek surfaces of this recording by Dan Boeckner, who also runs with the Wolf Parade pack, and wife Alexei Perry — the inevitable sophomore disc derived from band-related travels judging from song titles like “Passport Kontrol” and “Legal Tender.”
Is the New Order-inspired “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” about Handsome Furs’ rider? Does an album about touring indicate a bankruptsy of ideas? Perhaps, but Handsome Furs make the best of it, like smart gypsies rolling with each throw of the dice. Swiftly forged and just as quickly dissembled alliances, jet-lagged confusion, overly chilled rooms and relations, and that ever-motoring-forth motorik beat are the duo’s currency here. Cynicism and paranoia — and the idea of face control among certain strangers amid possible danger, as well as the different faces one presents onstage, on blog, on Facebook — pervade the not-so-light-hearted Bo Diddley bop of “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” Matters veer toward the Kills’ side of the torrid-twosome equation on, for instance, the muddily electric “Evangeline.”