Husband-and-wife team Alexei Perry and Dan Boeckner follow up their 2007 full-length debut, Plague Park, with a record that vibes on the '80s, but also delivers a punch of raw electronic rock. The Wolf Parade frontman and his short-story-writing belle from Montreal change direction from song to song, shifting from pressure cookers like "Evangeline" to the breezy stomper/Joan Jett rip-off, "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues."
The record is also interspersed with three instrumental numbers, "(Passport Kontrol)," "(White City)," and "(It's Not Me, It's You)." The use of parentheses around each each number would be smart if they actually gave these tracks more meaning or somehow modified the record's overall tone. But the short bursts of electronica are confusing instead of clever.
From beginning to end, though, Face Control is an excellent piece of music and one of the best records of 2009 thus far. Tracks such as "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything," "Talking Hotel . . ." and "I'm Confused" are the biggest winners.
Boeckner and Perry named the record Face Control, but lucky for us there's neither velvet rope nor discriminating bouncer at the door to their party.
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