ua

ua

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Dirty Beaches : Badlands 2011


Dirty Beaches released a number of EPs and instrumental - focused albums on cassette-only labels, before releasing the full-length Badlands in March 2011. Badlands was subsequently nominated as a long listed nominee for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize.


Dirty Beaches has also released singles including "True Blue"/"Sweet 17," "Lord Knows Best" and "Lone Runner," as well as videos, many of them directed by Zhang himself. Zhang has also recorded several original film soundtracks, such as for the documentary Water Park, by Evan Prosofsky.

Dirty Beaches' low-slung, lo-fi, post-rockabilly is the project of Alex Zhang Hungtai, who was born in Taiwan but moved to Canada at an early age. Mixing a croon worthy of Elvis or Roy Orbison with Suicide-like drum machines and a fondness for found sounds and hypnotic loops, Hungtai's music is equally familiar-sounding and surreal.


He released a slew of albums, EPs, and cassettes on labels such as Night People and Fixture Records, then moved to Zoo Records for his official debut album, Badlands, which was released in early 2011. Hungtai remained busy, issuing singles on Suicide Squeeze and a split with Xiu Xiu in 2011 and 2012, and released the Waterpark soundtrack on A Records in March 2013 and the double album Drifters/Love Is The Devil that May.


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.

Badlands is an album by Canadian musician Dirty Beaches. It was released in March 28, 2011 by Zoo Music.

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.

It was longlisted as a nominee for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize .



TRAXS

SIDE QNE



    01.Speedway King     3:29    
    02.Horses             4:07    
    03.Sweet 17             3:25    
    04.A Hundred Highways     4:43

SIDE TWO  




    05.True Blue             2:51    
    06.Lord Knows Best     3:24    
    07.Black Nylon             2:50    
    08.Hotel             2:02    

Format : Vinyl LP
Label : Zoo Music ZM010
Genre : Indie
Style : Rockabilly,Psycho,Dark
Influences : Suicide , The Cramps

1 comment:

  1. right on, thanks for sharing... you might like this! http://czarrose.bandcamp.com peace!

    ReplyDelete