Have you of late lost all your mirth, allowing yourself to sink into despondency and fantasies of suicide made all the more pathetic because you have absolutely no intention of going through with them? Not to worry! In such times of emotional paralysis—every thought in any which direction just another imagined road to futility and regret—there's only one thing for it:
NOISE!!!… some tape hiss to dredge the shallows of your consciousness, plus a little guitar twang and '50s
aw-shucks! trembling vox to sex up the muscle memory, make you come alive again, bucking and rearing to go! If all your desire has gone limp and withered up, dissolved into the nothingness you'd like to follow it into, these sounds should do the trick. Things are never so bad kicks can't be had. (Well, not
always, anyway.)
Here, then, is
Dirty Beaches. They—or he, young master
Alex Zhang Hung-tai—started out making homespun, lo-fi instrumental noodlings that were a little unremarkable, but exploded in 2009 with worded songs springing forth from the point where the caveman stomp of
rockabilly, the
motorik of
krautrock, the shit of
shitgaze, the aesthetic of
Suicide (the band) and the ethereal, yet twisted sensuality of early
David Lynch films all converge in a sultry murk of rambling, suggestive sound. Eerie, creepy,
sexy sounds—the mutterings (and occasional yelps) of a confused pervert driving his lonely lorry at night, kept awake by speed and reveries I think it best not to mention.
There are few cocktails as potent as lust, fear and confusion. Did I forget fun? Man, I did
not forget fun. And if you ever wondered what a grown man crawling on his hands and knees towards the custodian of his pleasure sounds like, wonder no more.
Before releasing their latest album, the highly recommended
Badlands, out now on
Zoo Music, those Dirty Beetches had a penchant for releasing their music on magnetic tape, and in very limited editions. Here's a sampler of the finest songs and soundscapes from those discontinued releases, starting in 2009 until more or less the present (with the exception of readily available CDs/digital albums and singles, such as
Badlands, a
split EP with
US Girls and the «
No Fun» single).
GONE To HELL COME FRIDAY:
- Like Dreamers Do
- Paris
- Black Horses
- White Sand
- Golden Desert Sun
- Motorcycle Rumble
- Shadows
- Coast to Coast
- Low Rider
- Forever in Gold
- Shangri-la
- Gone to Hell Come Friday
- The Singer (a/k/a The Folksinger)
- Teenage Queen
1, 4, 8, 9 & 11 from Dirty Beaches (2009)
2 & 7 from Night City (2010)
5 & 10 from Solid State Gold (2010)
3, 6 & 14 from Omon Ra II/Dirty Beaches split C-30 (2010)
12 & 13 from Dirty Beaches/Conor Prendergast split 7" (2011)
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