PeeP on PoP- Dirty Beaches

Dirty Beaches- Badlands (Zoo Music- 2011)

~by Gabe McBride

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One of the problems with most bloggy, buzzy bands, and Dirty Beaches might be the one right now, is they seem to rely so heavily on attitude, fashion, and presence over any kind of real chops, that the bubble bursts after a promising EP or two, or a single decent album, and then poof, it’s on to the next victim ready to stick the knife in their own back. The bands mindfuck the blogs and the blogs mindfuck the bands, and a lot of potentially good or even great music gets lost in this shuffle. So, after stepping down from my soapbox,  I am here to praise an band, well… a guy really, Alex Zhang Hungtai, aka Dirty Beaches, who relies almost exclusively on evocative atmospherics and style to create a persona, as opposed to making an album about the songs (that’s rule number one here at Pop on Purpose, folks). And I can’t stop listening to it.

Badlands, I would estimate, can be boiled down to being about three, or maybe four things: hot rods, hair grease, smoking, and talking tenderly to the ladies. Badlands lingers in Bukowski’s dive bars, sits in the passenger seat of Chevy speeding on a country road during a midnight drag, and plays in the background while Jackson Pollock splatters paint on a canvas spread out over the floor in his barn on Long Island, sucking on a Pall Mall. Some songs are straight up rockabilly or surf jams (‘Speedway King’, ‘Horses’), some are eerie piano set-pieces (‘Lord Knows Best’), and some emotive fragments (album closer ‘ Hotel’), all with the apparent intent of hearkening back to an idea of a time, not necessarily that time itself. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention David Lynch when discussing Badlands. I have seen more than article on the band and album refer to the record’s sound as “Lynchian” and this truly is the case, in more ways than one. Like Lynch, Hungtai creates moody American tableaus that they are both repulsed by and fascinated with; an idea of delinquent machismo and tough-guy idealism that they have observed, but likely never experienced (Lynch is an Eagle Scout from Montana, and Hungtai was born in Taiwan, and spent most of his life Canada). Plus, any one of these tunes could be on the soundtrack of most any of Lynch’s cannon. I’m not sure that Badlands is one of the best albums of the year, but it is the most interesting so far. 

For Fans of: The Raveonettes, Lost Highway