Handsome Furs

Handsome Furs' harrowing electronics cut to the bone, stripping down the muscle and the meat to draw out faded sketches of emotions and conjure visceral visions. The music is as much about the mood as anything—the vivid landscapes duo Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry paint on the backs of your eyelids, the walls of your studio apartment, the space hanging right in front of you. Sparse fields of lonely machines. Snow drifts and bleak metallics. Sad highway overpasses. Handsome Furs live in a jumbled trench of technology, a futuristic world they hate the existence of. Instead of fighting back, they hang white lights and emote a decadent vacancy as cold as the ice crystals of their Montreal home. In "Sing! Captain" off of 2007's Plague Park, Boeckner sings above the warbling static: "Feed them wine, feed them chrome/We hate this place here/It's our home, it's our home." But deep down inside the barrel of this machinery is a rusty locket filled with a hope and maybe a secret dream. With D*R*I. 18+.
Fri., Aug. 15, 8 p.m., 2008