Plague Park

Descripción

Fans of Death Cab for Cutie will remember how the Postal Service seemed to put Ben Gibbard on a cloud of keyboards, away from the grit of Death Cab's guitars and drums, making the singer seem almost ethereal. With Handsome Furs, you have a similar musical concept, pairing Wolf Parade singer Dan Boeckner with Alexei Perry (as Gibbard did with Jimmy Tamborello), but the effect is stunningly different. Here, Boeckner isn't calmed down by the spare synthetics and drum machines. Instead, he's dystopian in his lo-fi bellow, ricocheting between electro-drums with mid-tempo guitars either strummed acoustically (as on "Snakes on the Ladder," awash in synths and yet clattering) or laying down a thick-set distortion that's a fine foil for all the electronics. The nine tracks run a tad samey-same, but that's at least part of their charm. They and assert Boeckner anew as a prescient, skeptical voice, coarsely toned and draped in machine-sounding music even as he inveighs against the post-modern world--technology and urban living and traffic and so on. --Andrew Bartlett