Handsome Furs go east

They say that opposites attract.
In the case of the Handsome Furs, this proves true–at least of the music.

Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry are husband and wife. And while Boeckner strums the warm guitar, Perry handles the emotionally detached, alienating electronic beats.
Although both are coming from two opposing poles, the music comes together. They make songs that are eerie yet energizing. It works. It’s reminiscent of old punk bands who branched off into electronica, like Joy Division/New Order, and The Fall.

The newest Handsome Furs album, Face Control, is sort of a concept album, according to their MySpace page. It looks to Eastern Europe for inspiration, “echoing through empty skies and frozen plains.” It also draws a creepy, but true, parallel between the old-school Big Brother monitoring of the Soviet Union, and what we do now, which is “self-monitoring.” We are “happily reporting our every thought and move to blogs and facebooks and myspaces and credit/debit accounts and surveillance cameras and GPS devices.”
Hmm. Think about that the next time you just have to update Twitter.