(Psychedelic, Rockabilly, Lo-Fi, Experimental) Dirty Beaches - Badlands - 2011, [WEB] FLAC (tracks), lossless

Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai, a Taiwan-born Canadian immigrant who spent a good chunk of his life feeling unmoored and adrift. "I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised," he told us last month. "For me, home is a collage of all these fractured landscapes that I try to piece together." This sense of displacement, combined with an ear for cinematic sounds-- particularly the eerie, stylized noir of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wong Kar Wai-- fuels his work, which squeezes the sounds of early rock'n'roll and 1950s music through a lo-fi, distortion-drenched filter.
This set of influences, which extends to the minimal thrust of Suicide and the Cramps' manic rockabilly, feels unique, simply because it's been largely untouched by indie music during the past decade or so. Sure, there's been some casual dalliance between garage-pop and doo-wop, but we haven't really seen a lo-fi artist reach past the 60s to fully drape himself in such a dusty, road-weary atmosphere. Of course, mining a cool set of inspirations doesn't itself make for a good record. What Hungtai excels at, in addition to building evocative mood and atmosphere, is a sort of conceptual, film-like storytelling shot through the lens of these bygone eras of music.
Talking about Badlands in this clip, Hungtai said the album's songs explore "repeating themes, reoccurring characters being in exile or just away from home." So on each of the these tracks, which alternate between rumbling motorcycle punk and more plaintive ballads, you get this sense of man-on-the-road drama, a drifter going from town to town, dive bar to dive bar. The songs work in part because Hungtai has great command of his voice, moving easily from a hushed sing-speak to a throatier purr. A good example is the throbbing Lolita anthem "Sweet 17", where he shrieks and coos over a blown-out drumbeat and scraping reverb, making the track feel equally threatening and sexy.
Because the record relies quite a bit on aesthetic, it could start to feel same-y without tonal shifts, which is why Hungtai is wise to include the slower numbers. "True Blue" and "Lord Knows Best", a pair toward the end of the album, offer a druggy, somber counterpoint to the punchier stuff earlier on. Something like Everly Brothers-style solemn crooning recorded in a closet, both have this great death-prom vibe-- romantic and even pretty but with a healthy dose of evil. Two instrumental pieces that close out the record don't hold up quite as well, but ultimately what you get here is a refreshing take on the well-worn tropes of lo-fi-- raunchy, old-fashioned, and pompadoured, there's nothing else that sounds like this right now.
- PITCHFORK