Handsome Furs

Poor Dan Boeckner. Everytime he sits down at the old keyboard to catch up on the goings on of the internet, I'm sure he's bombarded by music nerds' gushing adolation of his more prolific and (hate to say it) much cuter bandmate, Spencer Krug. Rather than send out a press release reiterating the fact that he wrote and sang on half of Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary, Boecker has made an overt ploy to shift attention squarely back in his own direction by forming a side project named Handsome Furs with his fiancee Alexei Perry.

Armed with little more than Boeckner's own voice, a guitar, a synthesizer, and a drum machine, Handsome Furs produces a surprising amount of sound for a duo. The band takes a decidely minimalist approach to song construction, relying on the addition and subtraction of repetitive layers of instrumentation to the mix as a mechanism for propelling the music forward (rather than say verse/chorus/verse). This contrasts with the more complex forms and musical intricacy laced throughout Wolf Parade's catalogue, though, interestingly, the end result is the same. Both Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade create music that ebbs and flows with kinetic energy, making it so that the songs feel new and exciting even after the fiftieth listen.

Handsome Furs' debut album, Plague Park, comes out on Sub Pop on May 22nd. The album release coincides with a small tour of the eastern seaboard, check out the tour dates below.

May 15, 2007 -- Massey Hall, Toronto Canada
May 16, 2007 -- Massey Hall, Toronto Canada
May 22, 2007 -- Club Hell, Providence RI
May 23, 2007 -- Mercury Lounge, New York City NY
May 24, 2007 -- Mercury Lounge, New York City NY
May 25, 2007 -- Khyber, Philadelphia PA
May 26, 2007 -- Maxwells, Hoboken NJ
May 27, 2007 -- T.T.The Bears, Cambridge MA
May 28, 2007 -- Lambi, Montreal Canada

[Myspace] Handsome Furs
[mp3] "What We Had"