Live Review: A Handsome Wolf Parades Divinely into Boston
Some musicians are like sharks, always moving. Dan Boeckner’s been busy navigating many different currents throughout his career, primarily known for splitting the songwriting duties in Wolf Parade along with Spencer Krug. He’s also dropped a trio of records with his now ex-wife as Handsome Furs, and notably teamed with Spoon main man Britt Daniel and Spoon sideman Alex Fischel for their one-off record Divine Fits. (Was that really twelve years ago? Damn, time flies).
Fischel would be manning his familiar position on keyboards on this tour, and it wasn’t a big surprise that Sam Brown, also a Divine Fit, but first a New Bomb Turk, was on drums. The wild card in the mix was guitarist Ben Greenberg, known for his slash and burn and blow-up guitar attacks via New York City sonic terrorists Uniform.
Greenberg kept his caustic riffs tempered enough to stay within the boundaries of Boeckner’s muscular songs, and turned out to be quite a good fit, regardless of which project’s songbook was pulled from.
With his first solo record out, appropriately titled Boeckner!, Dan wasted little time getting us acquainted with it by playing all eight songs fron the record as per track listing order.
The rest of the night was a mix from his other projects; “My Love Is Real” from the Divine Fits record was a highlight but the burning “I’m Confused” from Handsome Furs made some sparks fly from both fretboards.
During the show, Boeckner dropped a hint that if we were up for a road trip to see the Wednesday show in Brooklyn, a special guest just might show up. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to take a guess that maybe that unnamed person is Britt Daniel, so please report back if you saw the show.
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