Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches isn't shy about his influences. A year after 2011's breakthrough Badlands elicited comparisons to retro-damaged ancestors Suicide, he released a recording of an improv-heavy performance in Norway that featured a "loose adaptation" of Suicide's "Ghost Rider". Earlier this year, Hungtai shared the title track to the second disc of his new double-album, Drifters/Love Is the Devil, accompanied with a quote attributed to wastrel poet and professed inspiration Charles Bukowski: "Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality." And the YouTube account used to host the song was an abused portmanteau of Chinese director Wong Kar-wai's name.
Hungtai told Pitchfork around the time of Badlands' release that his media-saturated theatricality spoke to his own experience as a perpetually displaced stranger in strange lands-- he was born in Taiwan, but raised in Montreal: "Nostalgia can be a sickness or melancholia, like how immigrants that came to North America feel homesick. I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised. Home is a collage of all these different, fractured landscapes that I try to piece together."
Badlands was an impressive work, but it was also sonically limited, switching almost exclusively between howling open-road antagonism and evocative, soft-focus balladry. On Drifters/Love Is the Devil, all previous limitations are off the table. The double album, recorded in Montreal and Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe's Berlin studio over a period of six months, is both sprawling and detailed, a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights. Though few have heard his earlier material, Dirty Beaches' catalog is more diverse than the two-headed focus of Badlands suggested. But Drifters/Love Is the Devil is more robust and eccentric than anything he's ever released before.
This pair of albums also represents some of Hungtai's most experimental work yet, a hard left-turn from Badlands' song-oriented approach. There are a few excellent echoes of that previous record's sound on Drifters-- the junkyard roll of "Night Walk", "I Dream in Neon"'s bad-vibes glow, the raw blast of "Casino Lisboa"-- but song structure is less of a concern here. This music isn't impenetrable, but for those who listen more for song structure, it might take a few listens to lock into what Hungtai's doing. Much of the material collected on both discs-- each is about 37 minutes long and has its own title, though they are sold together-- comprises vignettes of varying length that exist in their own space. But a front-to-back listen starting with Drifters is the best way to take in the rich, haunting soundscapes on display.
Drifters, focusing more on songs, is the more accessible record, but it's also a confrontational work. The sole instrumental, "Belgrade", featuring synthetic oscillations matched with a perpetually doubled-over bass line, is chilling. Its electronic textures are submerged in pools of echo, bringing to mind vast, empty spaces that create an uneasy atmosphere; "ELLI" is a gothic, coldwave-leaning song about aspirational love ("In my dreams I'm always with you"), while "Aurevoir Mon Visage" finds Hungtai shouting in French over tumbling drums and a low jet-engine roar: "Goodbye my face/ It is nothing".
And then there's "Mirage Hall", which towers over Drifters and proves its most satisfying surprise. Hungtai has flirted with electronic music before, on 2010's Night People-released cassette Night City, but he's never operated with this kind of scope. Over nine harrowing minutes, he and collaborators Shub Roy and Bernardino Femminielli build a thick monolith of clattering techno, broken up by ethereal moans that eventually dissolve into high-pitched howling noise. Five minutes in, Hungtai enters screaming in Spanish, his vocal performance turning from muscular to absolutely blood-curdling.
The weatherbeaten horns and underwater ambience of Drifters' closing track, "Landscapes in the Mist", act as something of a portal to Love Is the Devil's drastic shift in sound. Hungtai has hinted that Love is a breakup album, but you don't need any context to hear this music as impossibly sad and lonely.
By design, Love Is the Devil is much more abstract than its counterpart; "Woman" is four minutes of synth and distant, irregularly plinked piano, while the second section of "Like the Ocean We Part" is a minute-and-a-half of what sounds like railroad field recordings. Give it time, though, and the album reveals itself as the more impressive of the two, a dense and cinematic exploration of grief and loss that is as pretty (the title track's swelling strings) as it is desolate ("Like the Ocean We Part (I)"'s dolorous vocals and radiant, solitary guitar). The highlight of the record-- and, possibly, the collection as a whole-- is the centerpiece "Alone at the Danube River", a seven-minute that features a guitar solo eventully overcome by waves of shimmering synths. In sound and spirit, it brings to mind Neil Young's masterful soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's gloriously empty 1995 Western Dead Man.
For me, "Alone at the Danube River" has an uncanny ability to lodge itself in my mind. After months of listening to Drifters/Love Is the Devil, its central guitar figure loops endlessly in my head, something I want to hum or whistle. And I think fits with Hungtai's overall artistic intention and shows why he's such an interesting artist. These records, steeped in reference and atmosphere, draw on memory but, being so textured and tactile, they bring the focus back to the present moment.
