Handsome Furs Ready For The Plague

Considering Dan Boeckner's former adversarial relationship with the media, he's remarkably relaxed while speaking on the phone from his Montreal apartment.

When Wolf Parade's Apologies To The Queen Mary was released in the fall of 2005, he famously called the band "a retarded dog with four heads," perhaps in a moment of frustration after answering the same questions over and over again.

"For a while, it was pretty annoying," Boeckner admits. "I could basically write every single weekly interview we did.

"I basically started telling people when they called me on tour, 'You're gonna be like, paragraph header, Isaac Brock, Arcade Fire, Montreal, hilarious anecdote, and then the headline will be a pun on Wolf. Like, The Howling.' [laughs] It got so tedious."

Given the fact that Montreal is no longer the beacon of buzz it once was, and the press have gotten over the fact that Boeckner is friends with Brock, he's a lot happier to talk about Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs, his new solo project with fiancee Alexei Perry.

Their Plague Park debut comes out on Sub Pop next Tuesday, and it's as desperate and chilling as anything Boeckner's ever lent his hallowed vocals to in the past. He plays guitars and sings, while Perry plays a KORG through a series of distortion pedals. The slow, steady beats are made entirely on a drum machine, giving the music a disturbing hollow effect.

"We started in December of 2005, but it was just an idea at that point when we were living in Vancouver," explains Boeckner. "I started writing songs for it and Alexei started helping me out with them.

"We were just doing it for fun, doing them in our apartment. And then we booked a tour of Scandinavia before we had a set. So we wrote half of the Plague Park record in about a week."

With Handsome Furs, Boeckner now has a side project to compete — in a friendly manner — with Wolf Parade bandmate Spencer Krug's Sunset Rubdown. He's quick to point out that they've inspired each other plenty in Wolf Parade, and that Sunset Rubdown definitely motivated him to get another project off the ground.

Boeckner also says that when he and Krug first started playing together, Wolf Parade was going to be his band and his alone. It didn't take long for that to change.

"When Spencer and I started Wolf Parade — I've never talked about this in an interview, which is kind of weird — the original idea was that we were gonna start Wolf Parade as a collaborative vehicle for some of my songs," says Boeckner. "And then I was gonna play in a band that he was gonna start called Sunset Rubdown that he was gonna front.

"That was pretty much one conversation that we had about it. And then after the first couple practices we had in his apartment, we we're like, 'Maybe we should just make this a half and half thing.'"

As for getting Sub Pop to release Plague Park, Boeckner says that it wasn't a challenge in the least.

"I actually told them I was going to record this thing and I told them, 'I'll send you guys a copy.' And they were like, 'If you do this, you kind of have to put it out on this label.' I thought I was going to have to shop it around. But yeah, it was actually pretty sweet that they wanted to put it out. I guess they have first dibs on side projects."

Wolf Parade are working on their second full-length record in their new home studio in Montreal. They were hoping to have it finished by the time Handsome Furs hit the road for about a month of touring next week. Wolf Parade will make their live return in August, minus occasional member Dante DeCaro, who's busy touring with his band, Johnny And The Moon.

"It'll either come out late 2007 or early 2008," Boeckner says of the Wolf Parade record. "It'll be December or January.

"I do know Sub Pop really wants to put it out. They're breathing down our necks. Not in a bad way."

Here are Handsome Furs' Canadian dates:

May 15-16 Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall w/Arcade Fire
May 28 Montreal, QC @ Club Lambi
May 8 Toronto, ON @ Comfort Zone

Here are Wolf Parade's tour dates:

Aug. 11 Kingston, ON @ Wolfe Island Festival
Aug. 24-26 Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa