Dirty Beaches - Drifters/Love is the Devil

Dirty Beaches

Drifters/Love is the Devil

(Zoo Music)

May 21, 2013

Grade: D+

Dirty Beaches (the solo experimental/ambient/lo-fi/ project of Alex Zhang Hungati) managed to surprise everyone with his debut, Badlands, in 2011. As far as ideas go, combining hip hop sampling with 60’s surf rock guitar riffs and lo-fi production, topped off with a desire to juggle complex themes of love and loss built around a central character arc that lies at the heart of each album (don’t feel upset if that last bit isn’t as readily apparent to you as the rest. I’m pretty sure you have to either be Hungati or one of his closest friends to get it), is a bit of a doozy. But Badlands somehow made it all work. It was far from an easily accessible album, but it was a richly rewarding listening experience once you gave it a chance, sounding quite like nothing else. So where does Dirty Beaches follow up,  Drifters/Love is the Devil, go so horribly wrong? The creativity sparks still there. Hungati still brings in that same drive he had on Badlands to explore with new sounds. The trouble with this double album album is that there’s simply far too much exploration with not nearly enough substance.

This problem isn’t apparent at first. The first half of the double album hearkens back to the enjoyable sound of Badlands on the first few tracks and improves on it. Dirty Beaches nixes the formulaic approach of looping already existing guitar samples to instead to create his own, leading to some enjoyable experiments in ambient drone. He even shows a willingness to play around with previously unused music genres. “Eli” utilizes a cool bit of icy synth and a pounding bassline, while “Casino Libra’ pairs organic, poly-rhythmic drumming patterns with a fuzzy, dream pop haze. It’s not till the 7th track on the Drifters portion, “Mirage”, do the cracks in the experiment began to show and Dirty Beaches manages to push the envelope too far.

“Mirage” feels like a song that’s 9 minutes too long and milks the experimental/ambient noise formula for all it’s worth till it simply becomes impossible to enjoy. From this point on, Drifters/Love is the Devil, ventures into pointlessly long, un-listenable territory, and never recovers its momentum until it’s almost too late. “Landscape Mist” , “Greyhound At Night”, and “This Is Not My City” , devolve Dirty Beaches sound experimentation to the point of parody. The same boring rhythms are repeated on an endless loop and his trademark, lo-fi beach drone, which was so charming at first, just succeeds at making everything feel more monotonous with each passing moment. At least those aforementioned songs attempt to be interesting and are merely killed by over repetition in lieu of actual creative song arrangement. “Woman” is just an offensively annoying, rhythm-less chiptune masquerading as ambiance. The Love is the Devil half of the album manages to regain some of its thunder by the end, making for a very difficult final impression. The final 1/4th of the album opts for dipping into the previously unexplored territory of film score-esque orchestral movements; a field that Dirty Beaches manages to sound just as home in as he is with all his other influences.

 

There was absolutely no need to release this as a double album, and the fact that it was, is what ultimately holds this album back. If you junk the clunky double album idea, Drifter and Love is the Devil sound much stronger as stand alone albums, and the repetitive filler is more forgivable. But as they are now, the few glimmers of brilliance that Dirty Beaches manages to achieve are spread too thin over over an unnecessary double shot of overindulgence.

Recommended Tracks: "Night Walk" , "I Dream In Neon" , "Eli" , "I Don't Know How To Find My Way Back To You"