Handsome Furs’ first effort Plague Park, released two years ago, was all too quickly dismissed as a hobby album for Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, the result of a man taking up model airplane painting to distract him from the day-job. There was good reasoning for this- It was, after all, made with his then-girlfriend and now-wife Alexei Perry in their home, with her contributing mainly superfluous drum machine accompaniments and synth lines that were all too subordinate to Boeckner’s roaring lion guitar licks. Call it female empowerment, but Face Control goes about realigning the gender balance in Perry’s favour, and all the better for the Handsome Furs’ viability.
Face Control is an album with all the incomparable energy of a honeymoon night wedded to a newfound cohesion any marriage counsellor would be jealous of. Rather than ripping his guitar strings to confetti, Boeckner blends simple melodies into Perry’s more expert soundscapes, focussing instead on weaning chunky hooks from his trademark neck-wrenched and saliva-flecked vocals. And what hooks. Whether on lead track Legal Tender’s ‘It was nothing/It was nothing to me!’ or Talking Hotel Arbat Blues army march-chant ‘There was a guy who came in from the cold/He’s never gonna get past face control!’ Boeckner has a frightening knack for filling your head with surrealist inanities while still sounding full of indignant vitriol.
Boeckner’s never shied away from his Bruce Springsteen comparisons, happy to play a more fantastical and abstract version of the Boss’s blues-collar rock. As such, songs like All We Want, Baby, Is Everthing and Thy Will Be Done hardly raise an eyebrow when their Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Tunnel Of Love lineage is blatantly audible- Handsome Furs sound singular enough from all their contemporaries, and in Face Control have created such an unabashedly addictive album you’ll find it a more worthy way to spend your time than hunting out the 80’s-era power of Springsteen on Working On A Dream, Magic or Devils & Dust.
