Saturday, July 18, 9pm--HANDSOME FURS with THE CINNAMON BAND & DJ Bryce, $10/12.
Handsome Furs are not a message band and they are not political, but Handsome Furs are a message band and they are political.-Haukur S Magnússon
The juxtaposition of cold, metronomic, electronic beats, courtesy of Alexei Perry, with the jagged, dissonant and frail, broken or breaking, guitars of Dan Boeckner portray what it is to be a human being at the bottom of the 21st century. It underlines the confusion you feel as your best friends are conveyed to you via a series of ones and zeros passing through lines and cables and microwaves; the same confusion felt witnessing the pure, wholesome thrill of a band of musicians pouring their hearts out on stage, through someone’s cell phone as pixelated streaming video; the profound and bitter frustration of your long-distance relationship with the world up against a burning, alcohol-soaked sunrise as you admit some things you never thought you would; your constant feelings of inadequacy intertwined with the omnipotence modern technology grants us all. You are there, yet somehow you never are. As we all are and are not [...] We have built and taken up residence in our own Foucauldian Panopticon. Put in the context of a Soviet surveillance state of total control, modern western life becomes outright eerie.
Of course, there is always hope, and this is perhaps the point. The songs on FACE CONTROL often cast us as the young lovers in the shadow of the system, plotting their escape, revelling in their freedom as the shackles tighten around them. In the past, freedom may have meant jumping a barbed wire fence, or crossing a treacherous ocean or burning desert. On FACE CONTROL Handsome Furs show us that in our modern age escaping these constraints has simultaneously become easier and more complicated. While it once meant hanging on, it now means letting go, and drifting off, refusing to participate in the structure that shapes and dominates so many lives, eschewing traditional values, opting instead to make up their own ways.
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