Dirty Beaches - Drifters/Love is the Devil
When I think of Alex Hungtai's work as Dirty Beaches, two things come to mind; the movie Mulholland Drive by David Lynch or a raggedy man in a leather jacket walking the streets of an unknown city. This double album is a perfect representation of these two examples. The first album, Drifters, is somewhat of an hommage to Wong Kar Wei and the drifter lifestyle. I get the gist of a man who is just going from bar to bar, from town to town just smoking a cigarette and playing the guitar as he walks the roads to his next destination. The songs Night Walk, I Dream in Neon and Casino Lisboa all have extremely catchy melodies that seem to expand into eternity. As I walk to catch my train in the morning I always find myself humming Night Walk, tapping my feet to the beat.
These three songs are a good place to start if you are just getting into Hungtai's dense catalogue of Lo-Fi recordings. The more that you listen the more you start to understand what Dirty Beaches is actually doing. He is not trying to create an "album" by todays standards. His music is too cinematic to just be placed in a rock or jazz section of a music store. Hungtai's real target is to create a soundtrack for whatever concept he seems to be toying at. His music would fit more into movie genres than actual music genres.
As we finish off Drifters on a sad and lonely note, the more experimental and odd album starts to play, Love is the Devil. The first track, Women, immediately gets to my senses and gives me an uneasy feeling that gets stronger and stronger as I listen to it. The catchiness is gone upon this record but instead, Dirty Beaches gives me an experience thats more riveting. The lyrics and ideas that go into this album seem so straight forward, a man loves a woman but knows that he will have to leave her just like everything else in his life. It's basic when trying to explain it through the english language but as Hungtai knows music can make it all the more interesting, especially when you have a theatrical standpoint like Hungtai has.
All in all this album is so good and just keeps getting better. The Lo-Fi recording quality bridges these to distinctly different albums together creating the masterpiece know as Drifters/Love is the Devil
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