News / / 14.05.13

DIRTY BEACHES

Soup Kitchen, Manchester | May 11th

Alex Zhang Hungtai, aka Dirty Beaches, makes music for travelling late at night down endless highways and past sleazy hotels. Unlike the sounds on his 2011 debut Badlands, which was chock full of warped rockabilly-inspired slop reminiscent of NY synth pioneers like Suicide, Dirty Beaches have progressed massively, previewing entirely new material from the forthcoming record Drifters / Love is the Devil, which has retained the primal sonic urgency of his previous record but with a stronger emphasis on discordant groove and throbbing electronics than before.

Had Bobby Vinton not contributed to the soundtrack of David Lynch’s surreal cult classic Blue Velvet then Hungtai and his band would have been the perfect replacements. Cloaked in feedback, rocking Hawaiian shirts and black leather, Dirty Beaches whelp and grunt into 50s microphones. It’d be easy to dismiss the aesthetic as a one-dimensional gimmick if the music being played wasn’t so damn good. Drawing from his recent ambient soundtrack for the film WaterPark (directed by newbie Evan Prosofsky), and his clear inspiration from his new hometown of Berlin, Hungtai has allowed this new material to breathe, with the heavily modulated grooves crossing over into the more discordant sides of the electronic music spectrum.

Nightwalk is based around a galloping beat complete with percussive clicks that give the track a murky dancefloor edge. Yet, despite the lyrics being almost completely lost in the cavenous sounds of the band, Hungtai is a captivating dude to watch, conveying a primal passion against the looped chaos lurking out the speakers. Screaming and uncontrollably punching the air like a man possessed, the band launch through tracks rich in sonic textures, ranging from looped funk guitar riffs, piercing reverb-heavy melodies and a dancefloor drop – not one you’d hear on a beach tucked away in the Adriatic, but a sullied, polluted space. And yes ladies and gentlemen, it sounding fucking great.

 

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facebook.com/pages/Dirty-Beaches

Words: Alex Hall

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