"This band is completely based, aesthetically and otherwise, on travelling, on absorbing places and regurgitating them in music," says HANDSOME FURS' Dan Boeckner.

"Face Control", the second album by the Montreal band, draws inspiration from Eastern Europe and re-maps Eastern Bloc surveillance state themes to contemporary life and the irony of our slow acceptance and embrace of self-monitoring, through blogs and facebooks and myspaces and credit/debit accounts and surveillance cameras and GPS devices.

The album's juxtaposition of cold, metronomic, electronic beats, courtesy of Alexei Perry, with the jagged, dissonant and frail, broken or breaking, guitars of Dan Boeckner convey what it is to be a human being at the bottom of the 21st century.

And, at the same time, provides the means to opt out. Alexei Perry and Dan Boeckner wrote the songs on "Face Control" together.

The album was recorded and mixed by Arlen Thompson at Mount Zoomer and was mastered by Harris Newman at Hotel2Tango.