Badlands
[2011; Zoo Music]
GENRE: The crackly, low-fi-zombie-crooner on Elvis' shoulder. Said zombie-crooner may have been hired to score a David Lynch film.
Click here to listen
Listening to songs like "Sweet 17" and "Lord Knows Best," you'd think 30 year-old singer-songwriter Alex Zhang Hungtai grew up on a steady diet of rock 'n roll's golden oldies, anchored to a collection of dusty '45s salvaged from his parents' attic. But Hungtai's life has been a bit of a nomadic experience, anchorless and wandering: "For me," Hungtai says, "home is a collage of all these different fractured landscapes that I try to piece together." This fracturing is immediately present in his music, particularly in tracks like "A Hundred Highways" where the simple, retro beats and a jangly 50's guitar are attacked by distressed feedback and shrieking noise fit for a David Lynch dream sequence. His music is both frighteningly alienating and warmly inviting, and Hungtai's ability to fuse this dichotomy is ultimately what makes his music so beautiful and unique. In an interview with Pitchfork, Hungtai discusses the presence of nostalgia in his songs, pointing out that nostalgia is really a type of sickness that people feel (the word itself is the combination of the Greek 'nostos' meaning 'return home', and 'algos' meaning 'pain'). And for a musician who has no home, these fractured soundscapes embody the painful return to the life of someone constantly on the road. Ultimately it seems as if his music represents the chaos that was bubbling below the 1950s facade of control and affected calculation--a Kerouac yearning for the road but confined to a small room. The only downside to the album is how long it took for it to make it through those cracks and onto the road.
Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best by thesubs-blog
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