Free shows in hotel bars, probably the best invention of them all. Local stalwart promotor Fritz's Corner brought us this excellent Montreal act on a dark Autumn midweek date in October. We did our first UStream broadcast as an experiment and it turned out pretty well (sorry for the bad camera angle though). The live stream was promoted on Facebook and Twitter by both the band and their label, resulting in heavy traffic from fans all over the world, especially from North America. Thanks a lot Sub Pop.

"For their breakthrough second album Face Control, Handsome Furs - the synth-pop duo featuring Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner and his wife Alexei Perry - traveled around Eastern Europe, where they explored club music and its culture in the post-Soviet era. It was a cool backstory for a great record, but the tales behind the group's third album, Sound Kapital, due June 28, are even crazier. Listen to our complete preview stream of the LP, a week early, here. Over the last two years, Boeckner and Perry traveled across Asia, where they helped an up-and-coming punk band in Myanmar put on a DIY show (and release a record), swilled strange hallucinogenic rice wine in Vietnam, explored secret underground nuclear fallout cities in China, and, of course, discovered all sorts of foreign music and sounds, which inspired the wildly deranged, thrilling, and spastic electro-punk of the pair's third album." SPIN

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