Handsome Furs: "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything"

I kind of went all over the spectrum with the forthcoming Face Control in the days following my illegal download. In the first couple of listens I was pleasantly surprised, as I wasn’t a fan of 2007’s half-sketched Plague Park, but also not crazy for it. Then I entered a strange, obsessive period in which I was convinced “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” is an amazing Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) homage that allies its anthemic guitar and synth with verses worth of lyrical grandiosity. “Heaven / was a place / we built out of stone,” Dan Boeckner declares, temporarily forgoing the modernist cynicism with which he skews our lives with his overrated (minority opinion) Wolf Parade material. And of course there’s the song’s titular chorus, again infused with Springsteen-ian romanticism, a “This is the moment!” inspiration I could imagine being played at a political rally if I didn’t also suspect that Boeckner and Perry were too cool to vote.

The rough ideas here, and throughout Face Control, are worth the cursory listen. But subsequent listens have laid bare the same veil-thin construction behind this side project that made me quickly lose interest in Plague Park: Boeckner still has a way of preaching to the choir that I’m in equal parts bowled over and alienated by. I lost that initial sense of hope in my initial impression that “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” may be the return from Wolf Parade’s unappealing foray into pseudo-prog to a sense of poetic license and DIY. But until the aesthetic control of Wolf Parade and the impulsiveness of Handsome Furs are reconciled, neither will be perfect.