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>> Handsome Furs examine small towns, cities and pared-down sounds on Plague Park

BLACK DEATH BEAUTY: Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

As Wolf Parade was starting to gather steam, Dan Boeckner, one half of the band’s singing/songwriting team, met Alexei Perry during orientation for a local telemarketing job. Selling business directories was never so sweet, but the couple left it all behind to pursue music and marriage. Although Perry is an author with no prior musical experience, Boeckner enlisted her help when he began writing songs that weren’t fit for Wolf Parade, and Handsome Furs was formed.

“We wanted to make these songs as full as possible with the least amount of equipment so it would just be the two of us, a drum machine, a keyboard and a guitar,” says Boeckner, “something we could throw in a backpack and go on tour with.”

The writing began in the winter of 2005, and as minimal, melodic, cool and casually paced as Plague Park sounds, its musical influences were Scandinavian black metal bands (perhaps for their Nordic melancholy) and seeing Sufjan Stevens live. But in the latter case, the lesson learned was what not to do.

“There were, like, 20 people on stage and they were playing in a church and everybody’s sitting down and it just sounded like a wall of shit,” says Boeckner.

“Everything’s very orchestral and very excessive right now, and a lot’s getting lost,” adds Perry. “It’s changed the songwriting and it’s changed stage presence too—there’s so much production going on, so many visual aids.”

Handsome Furs are bucking the trend that’s dominating indie-land, one Boeckner compares to the inflated arrangements of prog rock in the ‘70s, when punk had to come and steal rock music away from session musicians and bring it back to the streets.

And the streets, specifically the mean streets of Vancouver’s ghetto, also cast their shadow on Plague Park.

“I’ve been to places like Baltimore and Cleveland, and that small area in Vancouver is as bad, if not worse. It’s the poorest postal code in North America,” says Boeckner. “I once saw this guy who was totally high on crystal meth, missing teeth and fucking covered in blood, just screaming at me. That’s when I wrote the song ‘I Hate This City.’”

By comparison, the Vancouver Island logging town of 1,500 where he grew up, and where his father still lives, started looking pretty good, despite the bad memories of being one of two punks in town.

“I remember being chased through town while I was high on acid by a pickup-truck full of guys. I had my jaw broken in a fight on Thanksgiving Day when I was 15. But last year, visiting my dad, I was like, ‘Oh, this place is actually really beautiful.’”

Montreal, and Mile-End in particular, is home to Handsome Furs for the foreseeable future, but they’re looking into a Canadian-Finnish grant program that would allow them to work in Helsinki. They’re already collaborating with Finnish musicians for their next record, and the title of this one was inspired by the city’s central park, where thousands of plague victims are buried.

“Helsinki was just a tiny port city when the plague happened,” Boeckner explains. “The bodies were buried outside the city limits, but then the city grew and expanded around the park.”

“It’s actually really beautiful,” says Perry. “The grass is more green there than anywhere else in Helsinki, and in the summertime, all the families go and drink beer on top of these graves.”

With guests at Club Lambi on
Monday, May 28, 9 p.m., $12