Dirty Beaches – Badlands
May 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
What if Suicide never died?
The answer brings us to Dirty Beaches.
Dirty Beaches is one of the more derivative bands I’ve heard in a really long time, but I don’t mean it in a pejorative way at all, because Dirty Beaches has brought derivation to the level of sublime genius.
In 1977 Martin Rev & Alan Vega recorded one of the rawest, slinkiest, punkest, most purely vicious albums of all time. The band and the record was called Suicide. With werewolf howls and husky whispers over a keyboard and a drum machine they proved you didn’t need guitars or glam to produce a wholly realized punk vision. The album dropped like a fully formed creature from the black leather lagoon and tore up the New York pavement.
After that record- they released some more, but it was never quite the same. Until now.
Alex Zhang Hungtai has recorded the follow up to Suicide’s self-titled debut and it’s brilliant. The twisted sonic additions, the neo-noir approach to 50s melodies, the coiffed hair, the puff of smoke, the dangling of a cigarette. Hungtai obviously loves rockabilly more than anyone since Lux Interior and it’s smeared all over this record like grease on a biker’s blue jeans. It’s low-fi, fuzzy, with it’s feet in the gutter and it’s head in the clouds of smoke from a gunning Harley.
This should be the soundtrack to a full length biker movie directed by Kenneth Anger.
Badlands Rising.
