The Handsome Furs’ story starts like a rock ‘n’ roll fable: in 2003, a guy and a girl meet in a telemarketing office in Montreal; they hate their jobs and are desperate to travel. He’s a singer and guitarist, and she’s a writer, so they form a band and decide to live out their dreams.
But the fable goes off-piste: instead of the North American rock club circuit, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry find themselves playing on a beach in Macedonia with gypsy bands, at an underground show in Burma as kids with walkie talkies patrol the area to make sure the cops aren’t coming, and in an absurdly hot club in central China where the opening act’s bassist is struck by a rival bassist’s pellet gun. In the process, the Furs dispel a few rock ’n’ roll myths: that rock music has lost its links to rebellion, that songs written about touring are tedious and that happy couples in bands can produce only self-indulgent music.
Sound Kapital, the Furs’ third and latest album, is lean, danceable, political and unstoppably energetic, and it was largely written on extensive tours of eastern Europe and east and southeast Asia. It starts with what could be a manifesto for the band, which they sing together over jagged electronic beats: “When I get back home / I won’t be the same no more.”
For Perry, who plays keyboards, the best thing artists can do is not to impose themselves on the places they visit but to “be changed by the things that you’re seeing … to just keep seeing more and more and trying to make sense of it. And if you can’t make sense of it, some of that ambiguity about what you witness in the world is the stuff that feels most honest.”
In person, the Furs are a mix of defiant determination and open-minded humour. They’d stand out in a crowd in any country: Boeckner looks like a cross between Joe Strummer and Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing Elvis, and Perry, with her flaming red-orange hair and tattoo of a dress-wearing sawfish, is the colourful yang to his old-school rock-star yin. As they sit sipping Campari & sodas on the balcony of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, enjoying a rare night off from touring, they reflect on the seeming contradictions in their art.
They strive to be as unflinchingly direct as possible in their songs — not for them the “big, gauzy metaphors” Boeckner claims have become a lyrical default mode in indie rock — but they’re happy to let listeners lose themselves in danceable beats. Sound Kapital, with its lyrics inspired by the plights of friends in fellow bands under repressive or corrupt regimes in places like Burma and the Philippines, is less stark than its predecessors, Plague Park and Face Control; Perry’s lusher synth textures give the songs undertones of menace and glimmers of euphoria, often at the same time.
Their relationship with their audience is similarly complex. On one hand, the Furs aim to reach a wide range of people: they filmed a behind-the-scenes tour travelogue last year for cnn.com. Says Broeckner, “Friends were like, ‘Grrr! CNN! They whitewash everything, and it’s just [shots of] you guys eating food!’” Perry chimes in, “But it might give other people the opportunity to learn a little more, and they may seek out something, which is all you can hope for with anything you do.” On the other hand, the cover of Sound Kapital features a photograph of a naked woman standing beneath concrete overpasses in Portland, Oregon – an appropriate combination of human vulnerability and cold urban architecture for the album, but hardly an image to woo middle America.
In Canada, the cover has been partially masked by black stickers in HMV. Although the Furs acknowledge this is “a milder form of censorship” than those faced by the underground bands they’ve befriended in Asia, Perry says, “The parallel is there: you have to stick to your guns on what you think is beautiful and meaningful.”
The Furs have been influenced by the artists they’ve helped and befriended on tour, from the Burmese band Side Effect, whose broke drummer practises on pillowcases (and whose upcoming album was mastered in Montreal through the Furs’ connections) to the Beijing tour promoter who graduated from an experimental film school and will be shooting the Furs’ next video with an all-Chinese cast.
“It’s not a tactical, money-making career move,” Boeckner laughs. “None of our moves are,” Perry adds. Then again, as a married couple working with no manager and no other band members, they’re not subject to anyone else’s preferences — unlike, for instance, Boeckner’s other band, Wolf Parade, which is on “indefinite hiatus,” largely because not all of its members wanted to continue touring.
For their part, the Furs are eager to keep returning to places where few other Western bands ever venture, to maintain the friendships they’ve forged and the fanbases they’ve built. The tours sharpen the couple’s perspective on their art, their politics, and the Handsome Furs’ existence itself. Says Boeckner, “Instead of going into this band being like ‘We’re against this! We’re against that!’, it’s, ‘We’re against these things, but we also feel happy and positive that we’re able to make music.’”
Handsome Furs play The Horseshoe in Toronto Aug. 2. Sound Kapital is available on Sub Pop.
