Dirty Beaches
A feeling of Alex Zhang Hungtai, an adopted Montrealer
Photo by exclaim.ca
Like it was in the early aughts, Montreal is once again the final piece for many musicians, the place where they come to put it all together. One need only look at Braids (Calgary) and Little Scream (Iowa, Mississippi) for recent examples of well-received music put out by adopted Montrealers.
Alex Zhang Hungtai is another recent example of a newish Montrealer making good in the music game. Badlands, his debut LP under the moniker Dirty Beaches, is already one of the most talked-about records of the young year. Critics—including the smarmy kingmakers over at Pitchfork—have been falling all over it, and, even before that, Dirty Beaches was one of the buzzier acts at SXSW.
Seriously, I was there—you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting someone giving Hungtai props and/or mispronouncing his stage name as “Dirty Bitches.”
With that in mind, Hungtai discusses the highs and lows of his South By.
“The highs were definitely playing the last show with Dum Dum Girls, [because] that was the last show of the tour and we were in celebration mode. Everyone was in a good mood that night. [And] getting paid by Vice and Pitchfork was nice too [because] bands usually don't get paid during SXSW unless you’re playing official showcases.
“[Low was] getting stranded with my gear all by myself unable to get a cab, walking like a human box pyramid and drunk obnoxious a--holes stealing my cab while I [tried] to load the gear into the cab.”
Given certain things I know about him from my interview, but also from other interviews (for instance, read the end of this one), those drunks are lucky Hungtai had his hands full that night. Dude’s not one to politely abide rudeness.
He does, however, abide film. This is not to suggest that the title of his album is a reference to Terence Malick’s 1973 masterpiece of the same name, but rather that it was apparently inspired by three specific David Lynch films: Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Wild At Heart.
“Influences for me is a feeling, not something in particular in its style,” says Hungtai. “The scores for those films are very different than the music in Badlands, but they share the same abstract feeling in its narration.”
“I have no interest in writing an album for an existing film that's already complete with its own score,” he continues. “That's not what Badlands is about.”
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