Handsome Furs - Biography
The modus operandi of husband and wife duo Dan Boekner and Alexei Perry is, in their own words, “to absorb life, the world and experience.” Currently based in Montreal, the couple met in the mid-2000s at a telemarketing office and the rest really is history — their history. Boeckner, formerly of Canadian indie band Wolf Parade, once said in an interview that Handsome Furs started the moment they locked eyes. Ever since, it has been their mission to see as much of the world as they possibly can, while putting a thoughtful spin on catchy electronic/indie/punk/pop. They make techno music for a techno age. Both fascinated with and troubled by the woes of the digital era and the disconnect it tends to foster, Boeckner and Perry employ modern means to resist modern ills, engaging with the world in a direct and immediate way, with the combination of music and travel serving as a means to total connection -- a kind of living meditation.
Armed with compact and easily portable gear (basically guitar and keyboard), they’ve traveled to exotic, far-flung locales that have inevitably informed their music. The songs for the debut LP, Plague Park (2007 Sub Pop), were partially inspired by a Scandinavian tour, and the album has a sparse elegance, tinged with old world melancholia. It’s a superb collection of songs, from the dark, acoustic guitar and synth pop of “What We Had” to the beautiful longing of “Snakes On the Ladder.” Perry’s keyboard lines are inventive and catchy, offsetting Boeckner’s affecting, deep toned vocals. One of the highest points on the record is the curiously euphoric “Dead Rural,” an exciting, joyful song despite the title and subject matter — a real anthem for living. The material for the follow-up, Face Control (2009 Sub Pop), was generated on tour in Eastern Europe. This album is more danceable and high energy than the debut, and these are brilliantly crafted, hooky synth pop songs that contain shades of Soft Cell, Human League, OMD and Ultravox with a rock and roll edge. But scratch the surface and there’s more to this release, as we find probing commentary on Eastern Bloc society and the way we inadvertently mirror it in our culture of readily available information. “Talking Hotel Arbat Blues” probably contains the most concise and hard-hitting nugget in The Handsome Furs lyrical catalog: “I don’t know but I’ve been told, every little thing has been bought and sold.”
In 2009, the band got asked to do a tour in Asia. They of course jumped at the opportunity, took their Flip cameras with them, and in a highly unusual collaboration, got invited by CNN to document their travels for a web-based series called “Indie Asia: On Tour With The Handsome Furs” which aired in early 2010. It was an eight-city tour through China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore in 2009, and the couple filmed their adventures in shopping, sightseeing, and generally soaking up much of their surroundings as humanly possible. In the first episode, Boeckner says that the more you see of a place before you play there, the better you connect with the audience, and this sentiment definitely shows through in the concert footage. It’s an insightful series with a charming and offbeat angle on the life of musicians on the road, the burgeoning tour circuit in the Far East and on travel in general. As exhausting as it is to tour on a budget, they both have an unquenchable thirst for new experiences. This unfailing enthusiasm feeds into their music, which is boundlessly energetic and at times genuinely inspiring, and it provides a perfect soundtrack to the web series. It’s likely that the travels in Asia will manage to filter into any new material that may be forthcoming. Though technology has contributed to an increasingly disparate and alienated culture, it’s also the means by which Boeckner and Perry make meaningful connections, by taking their music on the road and diving headfirst into the world. Whatever the next step is for The Handsome Furs, we can be assured it will be another adventurous chapter in their already wildly eventful history.
