By Max Hill
Dirty Beaches – Drifters/Love is the Devil
Through his solo project Dirty Beaches, electronic artist Alex Zhang Hungtai, expresses his experiences as a world traveler, exploring the globe without a place to call home. Born in Taiwan and raised in Montreal, Hungtai’s music is impressionistic, atmospheric and laden with nostalgia for an indeterminate time and place.
After two prolific years and a wide variety of genre experiments, Hungtai has distilled his approach into the brilliant, sprawling double album Drifters / Love is the Devil. Where his previous full-length as Dirty Beaches, 2011’s Badlands, seemed to evoke a parallel 1950s universe of hazy, film noir longing, Hungtai’s latest release is an intensely personal and impressionistic work of self-reflection.
Drifters is the more accessible of the two albums: each track is built around a sparse, lo-fi structure of tinny drum machine beats and throbbing bass lines, texturized by Hungtai’s melancholic synths and throaty Ian Curtis-style vocal delivery. The tracks here range from the airy synth pop of “ELLI” to the dark, computerized post-punk of “Night Walk.”
The theme throughout both albums is heartbreak, and Hungtai’s no-holds-barred performances seem therapeutic: On “Au Revoir Mon Visage”, he yells intermittently in French over a tribal drum machine loop, exorcising identity crisis demons in hauntingly direct fashion.
Where Drifters is expressive and pulsating, Love is the Devil is fragile and directionless, abandoning the former’s rigid song structures for ambient genre experiments. It’s on this second album that Hungtai excels. The weeping orchestration of title track “Love is the Devil” and the sparse piano chords framed by electronic oscillations on “Woman” are among the most beautiful music Hungtai has ever written, and seem to convey his longing and heartbreak more subtly and more effectively than Drifters’ trembling electronica.
Though Drifters / Love is the Devil is far from easy listening, Hungtai’s knack for experimentation and harrowingly beautiful instrumentals will reward attentive listeners. By finding common ground between introversion and extroversion, left brain and right brain, body and mind, Hungtai has made two of the strongest albums released so far this year.
Alice in Chains – The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here
For aspiring music fans during the grunge explosion of Seattle in the 90s, Alice in Chains was the heaviest option: Eddie Vedder’s leathery croon had nothing on Layne Staley’s raspy roar, and the guitar solo on Soundgarden’s wildly popular “Black Hole Sun” seemed tame when compared to Jerry Cantrell’s visceral guitar work on 1992’s “Them Bones.”
Naturally, when Alice in Chains was exhumed in 2005, many wondered if the band would be able to recapture the musical musculature of its glory days.
But rather than softening their sound, the zombified Alice in Chains became heavier, shedding its alternative rock sensibilities for churning sludge metal: 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue was heavier than anything the band wrote in the 90s, and re-casted the band as an alternative metal act who might feel more comfortable sharing a stage with Tool than with Nirvana.
The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, the band’s second album with its new lineup, sees them settling into a similar sound as their seminal 1992 album Dirt. But where the latter’s release seemed to reflect the musical tone of the era, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here seems aurally out-of-place: grungy, capable rock songs drained of the potency and immediacy that so defined the band’s earlier output.
Fans of Alice in Chains will find little to complain about here. Tracks like album opener “Hollow” and the tongue-in-cheek “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here” are mistaken as belonging to the band’s 90s catalogue, and heavier numbers like “Stone” and “Breath on a Window” continue the band’s gradual metal metamorphosis.
But like its predecessor, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here comes off feeling empty: the songs are catchy and sturdy, but whatever quality that made Alice in Chains so relevant during the days of grunge is missing.
Maybe it’s too late for these men, who are almost 50, to be making hard rock that stimulates the 20-something audience it caters to. In any case, the music on The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is as dusty and anachronistic as the Cretaceous skeleton on its record sleeve.
The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs
It’s all you need, according to The Beatles. Joy Division told you it’d tear us apart, but the Captain and Tennille assured you it would keep us together. Karen O knows they don’t feel it like she does, and Whitney Houston knows she’ll always feel it.
Where so many artists see the archetypical love song as a tired cliché, Stephin Merritt sees a motif. He mines the potential of what a love song can be by incorporating a wide variety of genres and points of view. “I had nothing qualitatively new to say,” he quipped in a 2000 interview following the album’s release. “Hence the idea of saying something quantitatively new.”
69 Love Songs features everything from the blushing beginnings of romance (“Absolutely Cuckoo”) to yearning better to have loved and lost ballads (“Busby Berkeley Dreams”) to anti-love beat poetry (“How Fucking Romantic”). Merritt’s thin baritone and verbose, often hilarious lyrics make the album an enjoyable listen, despite its daunting tally of tracks and its monumental 172-minute runtime.
However, not every song on the album is perfect: Tracks like “Love is Like Jazz” and “Experimental Music Love” seem deliberately added, as though Merritt had a self-imposed rule to include every musical genre.
But these occasional missteps don’t detract from the overall experience. Apart from being an impressive feat of obsessive-compulsive songwriting, The Magnetic Fields’ collection of 69 Love Songs happens to contain some of the best ever written, from the stripped-down beauty of “The Book of Love” to the electro-pop ecstasy of “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.”
Though there are few among us who can claim to have listened to the entire album from start to finish, it’s a challenge that any music lover should be required to undertake. 69 Love Songs is an audacious experiment that will test your patience and your iPod’s battery life, but few albums are as worthy of your time as this one.
