Dirty Beaches « Paris Rocks

Dirty Beaches

11 janvier 2012

On August 16th, 1977, millions of women lost their dream man. The King is dead, long live the king! Well, apparently a lot of fans took this saying pretty seriously. Since then, thousands of rumours, legends and conspiracy theories seem to have blossomed across the world, relating the presence of a post-mortem Elvis Presley around the corner, by the grocery store or riding a Camel in Morocco (that might be heard about Jim Morrison though). People look for hints he might have disappear on his own terms, retiring to avoid facing debt and decay. I personally have a different theory, not that I am very big on reincarnation. But I feel maybe Elvis did die and decided later to come back on Earth under a different skin, a newer identity. And maybe he chose to be Dirty Beaches. Alex Zhang Hungtai, the solo performer behind the project seems to have a different assumption: “I think the person that died was Elvis’ twin. The real Elvis lives on somewhere in a small town. And he works on a farm with a lovely woman with 5 children. But I prefer the ghost story of Elvis on the highways of Memphis hitchhiking amidst the dead of night”. I guess the ghost theory could also complement my argument. When you think about it, the King and Alex do share a lot, they both have talent for beautiful and blury layers of Blues and turn quickly into the object of women’s affection.

But Dirty Beaches’ journey is slightly different to the King’s. He was not born in a southern very religious family. Alex Zhang Hungtai is a Taiwanese-born Canadian musician. His pedigree is complicated even to pronounce. Alex as a person is a kaleidoscope of origins, memories in different places and feelings of loneliness and frustration that such a nomadic life can induce. When Alex will settle Dirty Beaches down somewhere, he has only one request: “I’ll pick place where people won’t ask me when I am from”. The road to “Badlands”, Dirty Beaches’ latest release was surprisingly short: Alex waited almost three decades to finally express the puzzle of his life into music. The first step was the release of his debut LP “Horror” in 2008, a catharsis album recorded live in Montréal to set the tone of Dirty Beaches. Since then, his productions are about passion and violence, lo-fi nostalgia and modern dementia. While he was working on “Badlands” he recorded a split with Ela Orleans. The twin records have the same mosaic-shape structure; the same layers of sounds and memories but their intentions are complete opposite. Whereas “Badland” is the most truthful to Dirty Beaches’ tone with its industrial crackling statement, the double features shows a focus on its feminine quality. These songs are meant to be b-sides of “Badlands” and yet work as a short-film narrative simultaneously.

There is one characteristic that links all of these songs besides the fact that they complement one another. It is their cinematographic potential. “It’s obviously influenced by David Lynch, Wim Wenders, and other directors I love” says Alex. But Dirty Beaches’ music is also a constant reminder of Wong Kar Wai movies, the way they both hide the main characters in the background of the stories they tell. They show the same emotional anarchy and focus on raw sounds of the modern city: the thunder of the train and the flood of rain. Dirty Beaches like Wong Kar Wai expresses the loneliness of human kind in the metropolis, nostalgia of a free past and dreamy conversations. A few weeks ago, Dirty Beaches played in Paris at the Silencio Club, David Lynch’s “hang out” which he designed and curated. They got to meet. A new step in the dizzying race Alex Zhang Hungtai is running. Long live the new King.

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