handsome furs

Yes, Handsome Furs is a Wolf Parade side project. Now forget this connection. With their second album Face Control, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry have earned the right to stand on their own.

The husband-and-wife duo's 2007 debut, Plague Park, was haunted by its connections to Wolf Parade's daunting Apologies to the Queen Mary, and rightfully so; the urban-flavored alienation that colored the brief record was reminiscent of Boeckner's other band and weighted down by suffocatingly dense electric instrumentation.

Face Control manages to overcome these shortfalls, giving Handsome Furs a sorely needed identity. The focus has moved out of the city and towards the coast-specifically the Russian coast of the Baltic Sea. Song titles like "Radio Kaliningrad" and "Nyet Spasiba" evoke such locations, and song lyrics stating, "I felt a chill creeping down my neck/Darling please say we're not done yet," point toward desperate romance as a common motif. The band's press photos for the album, which show Boeckner embracing a lingerie-clad Perry suggestively on a bed, reinforce this sense of lurid sexuality. Boeckner's voice strains and cracks earnestly throughout, and not a single performance is less than feverishly compelling.

The instrumentation has been spaced out as well-you can even dance to some of these tracks-and standouts "I'm Confused" and "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues" are driven by drum machines that pound like overexerted hearts. Slashing guitars, Perry's active synth work and a scattered cowbell are all piled on top, bringing to mind a less robotic Joy Division with lust replacing some of the depression.

Face Control is still capable of descending into cacophony-intentionally as well as inadvertently-but even at its more dissonant moments, the band's newly discovered character and charisma prevent their sound from getting overwhelmed.