Do you ever have that feeling (sometimes unjustified, other times not) of feeling alone, abandoned, unable to be absorbed into the city (preferably a metropolis, preferably dirty, preferably alienating, preferably gray) in which you walk, breathe, think?

Then think about how Dirty Beaches must feel, who, no, is not a band, but a pseudonym behind which hides the tormented Alex Zhang Hungtai, someone who has never had a home. Taiwanese by origin, but born in Canada as an illegal immigrant, he has often declared that he has no homeland, that he builds his roots with those pieces of distant places that over a lifetime get lodged in your brain. 

Hungtai feels an overwhelming nostalgia for something he has never experienced, and you can picture him wandering the seediest streets of some metropolis across the ocean. A street lit by buzzing fuchsia neon lights and him walking with a lost look, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, tight blue jeans and a cigarette between his lips. Someone born with the charisma of a cursed sex symbol (he's practically a James Dean with oriental features and the voice of a post-acid Alan Vega and, despite the despair, his music is something damn sexy), but who will never be because he prefers expression to communication and interaction, which often resolves in tragic and alienating neurotic solipsisms.

After quite a few albums, Hungtai manages to explode only with "Badlands", an excellent lo-fi rockabilly nightmare soaked in darkness. Elvis thrown into a meat grinder, the Suicide suddenly seized by a sudden raptus of sociopathy. 

And now, year 2013, "Drifters/Love Is The Devil", a double album that rejects Dirty Beaches' usual tendency to make very short records ("Badlands" didn't even reach half an hour) and seems to construct with sound that patchwork of forgotten places, memories, and sensations that the author would like to piece together to find, finally, his homeland. A sonic homeland where you can't help but imagine empty, dark cities, made of smoke, landfills, and ruins.

A double album composed of "Drifters" and "Love Is The Devil": the first album more focused on song form and a more accessible approach, while the second proudly abstract, more instrumental and atmospheric. Yet, despite the apparent clear division, the two albums are extraordinarily compact and homogeneous amongst themselves (in fact, my advice is to listen to both in a row): they sound like a single blues for troubled souls

Only partially forgotten is the sensual rockabilly for terminally ill of "Badlands" (present here in a couple of tracks, including the obsessive and extraordinary "Au Revoir Mon Visage"), this new work plunges us headlong into eclectic sensations and sounds: blues, jazz, even painful string litanies ("Love Is The Devil"), electronic, ambient, resonant and melancholic echoes ("Like The Ocean We Part") solo guitar digressions ("Alone At The Danube River"), sketches of hopeless madness (listen to the wonderful "Mirage Hall", the less conspicuous little brother of "Frankie Teardrop").

Skyscrapers that are built and destroyed at impressive speed, among which Hungtai often speaks of love, that simple love that could easily end up in a pop song. What changes is the approach: his "I love you"s (or rather: YO TE QUIEROOOOOO) sound like those of "Cheree" by the Suicide, perhaps sincere, but also terribly unsettling, threats with sex transplanted in the throat. 

Dominating this army of genres, worlds, and sounds is, fortunately, once again, schizophrenia. A repressed sadness about to explode and generate the apocalypse.

A personal, complex but not daunting album, disjointed yet extraordinarily compact. An album that certainly won't please everyone and certainly won't please those who are too attached to "Badlands". But that's just fine, just as it should be.

"Drifters/Love Is The Devil" is the raucous and daring song of a man who has yet to find his place in the world, a nocturnal solo simultaneously wild and decrepit. 

Tracklist

01   Drifters (00:00)

02   Love Is The Devil (00:00)

03   Night Walk (00:00)

04   I Dream In Neon (00:00)

05   Belgrade (00:00)

06   Casino Lisboa (00:00)

07   Elli (00:00)

08   Au Revoir Mon Visage (00:00)

09   Mirage Hall (00:00)

10   Landscapes In The Mist (00:00)

11   Greyhound At Night (00:00)

12   This Is Not My City (00:00)

13   Woman (00:00)

14   Love Is The Devil (00:00)

15   Alone At The Danube River (00:00)

16   I Don't Know How To Find My Way Back To You (00:00)

17   Like The Ocean We Part (00:00)

18   Berlin (00:00)

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