Artist:
HANDSOME FURS
Label:
SUB POP RECORDS
Video:
“I’M CONFUSED”
Director:
Scott Coffey
Add Date:
April 9, 2009

Howdy music fans! It’s Andy Gesner and the staff from HIP Video Promo, here with a brand new clip from one of North America’s most exciting new bands. The video for “I’m Confused” by the Handsome Furs begins the same way it concludes – with thirty seconds of quavering synthesizer drone. It’s a fascinating sound, eerie and destabilizing, a bit like a siren or a machine on the fritz, and it sets the mood for the story to come. What follows is unnerving, sexy, arresting, compulsively watchable: a trip though a dark demimonde and an arty zombie flick condensed into a three minute rock video.

Disturbing? Sure. But Handsome Furs frontman Dan Boeckner knows that great rock music is, invariably, a scary thing to encounter. As the singer and songwriter of Wolf Parade, Boeckner has been frightening and thrilling audiences in equal measure for the past five years. Listening to At Mount Zoomer, the most recent release by the Montreal combo, is a kaleidoscopic experience – it’s trippy, tuneful, invigorating, and crammed to the corners with unexpected twists.Mount Zoomer became a leftfield favorite last year, and topped critics’ and listeners’ lists of the best album of ’08; it also established Boeckner as an internationally-respected songwriter and a resonant, articulate modern rock voice.

Handsome Furs, Boeckner’s project with his wife Alexei Perry, follows a parallel path: it, too, is spectral, moody, melodically rich, and sonically inventive. Perry’s off-kilter, imaginative synthesizer and Boeckner’s spiky six-string are perfectly paired; they’re complementary participants in a bizarre and dream-haunted dialogue. Early reviews of Face Control, their newly-released full-length, have been ecstatic: Pitchfork’s Paul Thompson called the set some of the best songs Boeckner has ever written. Perry and Boeckner, he raved, are a “match made in weirdo heaven”. “We’re as lucky to have them making strange, sumptuous records like Face Control as they appear to be to have each other”.

Director Scott Coffey takes the relationship between Boeckner and Perry as an inspiration for his clip for the dizzy “I’m Confused” – a standout cut on Face Control and a concert favorite. Because while the living dead populate and ultimatel y dominate this video, there’s plenty of performance footage in it, too. And while Boeckner and Perry aren’t literally zombies, they do often play their instruments like people possessed. In the “I’m Confused” clip, they’re rocking a house party that’s gone terribly wrong: black liquid oozes from the faces of the members of the audience and infects everything it touches. The band, too, is affected: performing in a near-frenzy, the Handsome Furs frontman succumbs to the evil influence. Before long, the show is over, and Boeckner is pursuing a terrified Perry in a deserted city park. Cornered by a fountain, teetering between revulsion and desire, she surrenders to his monstrous advances.

It is our greatest pleasure to be working with Lacey Swain and yet another inimitable Sub Pop band! If you need more info, call Andy Gesner at 732-613-1779 or e-mail us at info@HIPVideoPromo.com . You can also visit www.SubPop.com to find out more about Handsome Furs.

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