Drifters / Love Is the Devil
Alex Zhang Hungtai—a.k.a. Dirty Beaches—is a fairly prolific guy, over the course of six years releasing a stream of singles, collaborations, soundtracks, and albums (the standout being 2011\'s *Badlands*). *Drifters/Love Is the Devil* finds our dark-souled lover of skewed rockabilly and post-punk existentialism combining two projects recorded over two years\' time into one expansive, expressive work that\'s perhaps a bit baffling but surprisingly cohesive. *Drifters* comprises the first eight tracks here. The remaining eight, starting with \"Greyhound at Night,\" are haunting, sometimes-unsettling instrumentals. The second collection reportedly took shape after Hungtai moved to Berlin in the wake of a painful breakup. We know bleak can often be beautiful, but tracks like \"Love Is the Devil\" and \"Berlin\" somehow drill right to the bottom of the soul and paint despair in new forms. From *Drifters*, we glean the spark of *Badlands* on \"Night Walk\" and \"Elli,\" and we sense new textures on tracks like the jittery \"Aurevoir Mon Visage\" and the shape-shifting mini-epic \"Mirage Hall.\"
The latest from Alex Zhang Hungtai's reference-heavy experimental music project is a double album. One half offers some electronics-heavy twists on the desert noir songs of his last album, Badlands, while the other veers into abstraction. Taken together, they offer a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights.
After the Suicide-quoting rockabilly blitz of Badlands, Dirty Beaches returns with a cinematic double album exploring his own dark soul.
Listening to a Dirty Beaches album is the aural equivalent of bloodletting.