handsome fur by amanda

A Week With Handsome Furs' "Plague Park": Day 4

12 July 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Amanda Walker

Falling in love with an album is similar to dying. You grasp at every note of the music as if it was your final breath and you want to wring from it every moment of life imbued within. Is it fear of the moment that the final note seeps out and silence replaces it, or are you so intensely focused on an object that its very existence becomes questionable? Try catching and holding a sound in your ear. See what I mean?

“And what we had don’t mean a thing. And what we had is already gone.” So goes what passes for track one’s battle cry. “What We Had” struggles between the emotionless drone of the keyboards, the steady electronic drums, and the acoustic warmth of a simple guitar. The song eventually disassembles itself into an electric strum. Meanwhile, the lyrics revel in their own ambiguity: Is Boeckner referring to the sudden understanding that material objects never meant anything, or the knowledge that a personal relationship exists no longer, or is he referring to death itself?

After yet one more listen, it’s evident that the album is intentionally thick with meaning. Most of the songs smother themselves, rotting and dying under layers of noise.

“Sing! Captain” is easily one of the strongest tracks. A bass drum/keyboard creates the song’s heartbeat entangled in criss-crossed veins of feedback. The arteries of sound run dry, but the beat continues. Boeckner’s lonely croak fills the space between the beats with images of disenchantment. “And if there’s a God, he’s a little gone. And he holds you closely, inside these walls. But he hates his babies most of all.”

The track ends, but not without the beat giving up first. Consider it an indie-music myocardial infarction. The Handsome Furs are enjoying a sick a joke: They are creating music on Plague Park that is deadly infectious.

Sub Pop Records

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