If Dan Boeckner and Alexi Perry have any shame about indulging in just about every cliché from the rock and roll handbook, they sure do a nice job of hiding it. As Handsome Furs, the married duo essentially lives out every angst-ridden teenagers’ dream. That is, to start a band, run away from home with a beautiful girl, collectively pour your hearts out to thousands of fans in dingy nightclubs, and live only for the moment, free from responsibility or material temptations, as outsiders in an otherwise homogenized, grinding adult world. While maybe far from the truth, the band’s success more or less lies on their ability to sustain this myth, and this do very, very well, both on and off the stage. It doesn’t hurt that they write some of the best rock songs this side of Iggy Pop and Glenn Danzig, but history has proven how far a little attitude and swagger goes in this line of work.

Their recent set at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ leaned heavily on material from their most recent album, 2009’s Face Control. Boeckner has an uncanny ability to rewrite the same song again and again without ever becoming tiresome or repetitious, and the subtle dynamics of tracks like “Legal Tender” and “Evangeline” become even more magnified when one witnesses the humans behind the noise. Perry’s synthetic bass and drum flourishes are at the forefront, while his guitar seems to be permanently set to “80’s thrash metal”, to the point where minute riffs become walls of feedback and something as simple as hammering a chord becomes a monumental achievement. Their best song, “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything” highlights every quality that makes this pairing so effective: Their ability to extract an infectious melody out of the most base ingredients, reference their heroes (in this case, New Order), and make it completely their own. If Bonnie and Clyde had been musicians instead of murderous bank robbers, they would have sounded something like this. Nearly every song ended with Boeckner frantically building a wall of feedback, his partner-in-crime sprawled across the stage, twisted every which way, exhausted, as if she’d been under the control of some violent spell for the previous three minutes and, through unfortunate circumstances, was being brought back to reality against her will. “This is our first time playing New Jersey,” Boeckner stated near the end of the set. “I used to collect bootleg tapes of shows at Maxwell’s, so this is something of a dream for us to be playing here.” The 200 or so in attendance couldn’t of agreed more, and when they closed with two new tracks (one of which they dedicated to the late Jay Reatard), one couldn’t but hope that they’d just hurry up and return already.