A Week With Handsome Furs' "Plague Park": Day 3
7 July 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Amanda Walker
This album feels like a long uphill trudge, a march to your own death in the dark of night. Imagine boots covered in damp soil, pale skin tinted blue under the moon, what little light casts over you catches the shovel over your shoulder. Plague Park, for a million reasons, feels like this: a nefarious scheme ending in someone’s death. It is the soundtrack to a zombie film, starring Bruce Springsteen.
The liner notes pronounce: “Handsome Furs in Rutto Puisto” as if it were a play or a film. Ruttopuisto is the famed “Plague Park” in Helsinki, Finland, named for the victims of the 18th century plague buried there. Handsome Furs have now provided a stage on which their first masterpiece may play out, and so the album’s plot thickens.
The music itself rewards with every consecutive listen. What keeps the songs interesting when they might otherwise flounder is that when Boeckner sings, it is often in service of anthemic grandeur. Vocal repetition here is key. Even so, the unsteady organs, monotonous beats, tenuous groans, and repetitious refrains don’t weigh as heavily as you’d expect. Even the lyrical content, as macabre as it often is, doesn’t beat you down like the overplayed misanthropy of a Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson album. Boeckner and Perry bring us a new kind of musical malaise, thus making a case for the parts of this album being far less than the whole that they create. Boeckner’s imitative intonation on “Dead + Rural” would be nothing more than a cheap ripoff of a song (“On The Darkside”) that was, at the time of its release, thought to be a cheap ripoff (of Springsteen). Instead, “Dead + Rural” limps along at a slower pace, using an electric guitar sparingly over a tattered layer of keyboards, and features a retro echo-chamber effect over Boeckner’s voice. “Dead + Rural” sees Handsome Furs oddly pay homage to a fictional “Eddie and the Cruisers” by recreating “On The Darkside”, but in darker tones.
And if you’re not careful, the album’s mythology will drag you in. For instance: do we consider it coincidence that another Eddie and the Cruiser’s song is entitled “Hearts On Fire”? That title is remarkably similar to a Wolf Parade track “This Heart’s On Fire.” Interestingly enough, Handsome Furs’ second track is entitled “Hearts of Iron.”
Soon you feel a little dizzy with it. Maybe it’s just sheer coincidence, or the sudden need to know, but you’re overwhelmed with the urge to dig deeper just to understand. Handsome Furs have done a good job of dragging you into their nightmare. It’s a sick and unhappy and eminently enjoyable nightmare.
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