DIRTY BEACHES - Drifters / Love Is The Devil 2LP (colour vinyl)

SEALED. Limited edition double LP on white vinyl. Out of print.

Highly recommended.

Alex Zhang Hungtai summarily dissolving the Suicide inspired, leather clad, bad boy image into a melancholy shroud of mist. Wonderful break up music, or music for any kind of emotional hang up or time spent in solitude. Hungtai's take on Suicide always felt personal, like assembling repetive loops of music to enact emotional catharsis over was Hungtai's way of exorcising some personal demon.

Dirty Beaches started off as a one-man band in 2005 in Montreal. A trans-Pacific nomad and genre-hopping sound-smith, Alex Zhang Hungtai has released music ranging from drone instrumentals to film scores, and possesses a fascination for dissecting popular American music like blues, rockabilly, soul, RnB and hip hop, often rendering it to a point where it is no longer recognizable.

Drifters / Love Is the Devil, is a sprawling double-album that chronicles the musician's life on the road over two years - through the labyrinths of Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, and many other cities; through heartbreak, rebirth and masochistic, existential self-reflection.

Recorded between Montreal and Berlin in the winter of 2012, the two halves of Drifters / Love Is the Devil are separated only by aesthetics, as they are tightly woven together thematically as one conceptual piece. If 2011's Badlands was an exercise in exorcising past ghosts in a semi-fictional world, then Drifters / Love Is the Devil is a reflection on the fragility of reality - that of the outside world in which the artist explores the nightlife of bright neon temptations and hedonistic values, and that of the inner world, one of remorse and lovelorn tragedies.