Here are two new reviews of
Dirty Beaches' Horror LP and one review of his recent show in Shanghai.
Steve Guimond for
Ottawa XPress:
A neato, small-run release from Montreal's most excellent Fixture Records, home to the non-hits and all-originals. Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai and vice versa, a local experimental musician who hides in the shadows of the bigger players in town. The Horror LP is his second album proper, a collage of guests and noise and loose beats and sounds found, sampled and birthed, no words to be heard save for the nameless voices that float in and out from radio wave land. Cinematic at heart, this is the soundtrack to those lean, lonely, long nights.
Eric Hill for
Exclaim.ca:
There is a peculiar strain of haunted electronics popping up lately that seem bent on exorcising the ghosts from the machines. Its proponents owe a debt to the deteriorating ambience of William Basinski and the abandoned industrial soundscapes of David Lynch. Artists like V/VM's James Kirby (recording as the Caretaker) and the Opalio brothers of Italy and their My Cat is an Alien project reach into the decaying guts of sound's mechanisms. Montreal's Alex Zhang Hungtai joins their ranks with his Dirty Beaches project. Like MCIAA, he follows a strict code of single takes but builds corroded layers of musical elements. Unlike the Opalios, he uses guitars, harmonica, drums and other actual instruments alongside his less identifiable noises and found sounds. While Horror's brief scenes strike a consistent mood closer to lassitude than actual horror, it feels like they need more bone and less of the pulverized meat that fell from it.
m. e. seeley for Layabozi:
[It] opened with Montreal-based Dirty Beaches, a lo-fi ‘call-it-pop’ project of Alex Zhang Hungtai. The space at YuYinTang was relatively empty when I pulled in and took a seat at the bar. Hungtai slipped the strap of his guitar around his neck and slapped the strings a few times, clicking at his pedals. He laid out a little riff over the drone of his guitar and let it loop, setting down his guitar and picking up the microphone. He unwound the cord. His step seemed light, relaxed, even bouncy, as if the stage were actually a hard mattress. The loop that he had thrown together was simple, a few slaps of the guitar and a quick riff, but it was enough of a backdrop. When Hungtai put the microphone close to his lips and began to croon, the sad turnout for the show seemed a good thing: it gave Dirty Beaches the intimate space that Hungtai’s sultry baritone and swaying, Lou Reed hips needed.
“I prefer to play alone. It’s easier,” says Hungtai. “ I only have to deal with myself.”
Hungtai began playing a few years ago and has released a string of EPs and LPs with Fixture Records. A number of his albums are available online.
“My music is pretty straightforward,” Hungtai tells me. “It’s pop. Verse-chorus-verse-chorus.”
That may be so, but, unlike pop, Dirty Beaches’ sound has a roughness to it, a reality that some of us—ye music elitists—have come to love and can only find in the scratchy records of Skip James and Pink Anderson (etcetera), but nowhere else. Dirty Beaches is a reminder that music is an attempt at communication—an imperfect attempt perhaps, but a heartfelt one. As I see it, the current trend of mass-produced, choreographed and contrived art is an assault on the creative impulse that stands as the last—and perhaps the only—distinction between us and them.
Dirty Beaches’ melodies are sparse and the lyrics unintelligible, but they are moving and pulsate with sex and longing and saltwater (Hungtai is a self-proclaimed ‘sailor at heart’). I found myself applauding a bit too loudly. I tried to whistle. If the goal of RESO is to spread the word about experimental music to the masses, then their invitation to Dirty Beaches was another step in the right direction.
Order Horror LP online.
Previously,
Horror LP reviewed by Warren Ellis and Said The Gramophone.
Watch Horror LP music videos
here.
