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Nyet Spasiba

While many bands dabble in Soviet kitsch —see Franz Ferdinand’s visual fetish for Russian Constructivist design— few seem as interested in contemporary Russia. Inspired by an Eastern European tour, Canadian couple Handsome Furs —Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner and his wife, Alexei Perry— have authored an album as Russian travelogue.

With its titular reference to Moscow nightclub policy (where admittance is based on perceived attractiveness), "Face Control" is steeped in oligarchy and corruption: "Legal Tender" dealing in the bribery that drives Russia’s kleptocracy, "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" artfully alluding to the government’s systematic assassination of its opponents, "Radio Kaliningrad" steeped in the nuclear terror of resumed Cold War posturing on the Russian/Polish border.


Boeckner has never been a verbose lyricist, but on Face Control he boils things down to barked simplicities, using reductionism as a kind of poetry unto itself. On "Evangeline," he coughs: "Imagine you and me/Following orders/Lights on a frozen sea/North of the border"; and it summons landscape and emotion, daydreaming and paranoia, warm hearts beating against the cold crush of reality. At first blush, it sounds like a dumb rocksong, but, like many of the dumb rocksongs herein, it has the habit of sticking with you.

I Know You Love Me, Baby

Musically, Handsome Furs stay stark: Perry punching out blunt drum-machine thunk, Boeckner wielding a ragged, overdriven guitar whilst wailing in his hoarse, Beck-like moan. It’s the same set-up as their debut disc, Plague Park, but far more striking: louder, bolder, way better. In fact, Boeckner's never sounded better.

Much to the dismay of Wolf Parade themselves, most fans tend to be drawn to the songs of one of their co-songsmiths over the other. And, given the 'other' in that set-up is Sunset Rubdown's resident genius Spencer Krug, well, it was hard to be anything other than a Spencer man.

But the case for Boeckner has taken a radical turn with Face Control; from the stadium-sized Bruce-isms of "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" to the sounding-out glories of "Radio Kaliningrad," four impossibly-epic minutes in which massive tangles of noisy guitar and droning keyboard are stacked up to the cresting heavens.

Where their first album seemed the tentative work of a bedroom-based love-in —a project record— on Face Control Handsome Furs have grown into something rather resembling a real rockband; a powerful, commanding, defiantly live and alive presence. Across two years of touring —two years of traveling due East, forging far into the dark, dark heart of Putin's neo-Soviet Union— Boeckner and Perry have grown tighter, closer; their songs more dynamic and aggressive. The results are unexpectedly impressive.

Record Label: Sub Pop
Release Date: 10 March 2009