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Friday, September 13, 2013

Dirty Beaches Acclaimed double LP Drifters/Love Is The Devil & Remaining US Tour Dates

Did you catch them last night at Empty Bottle?!  Check back with ChiIL Live Shows like we vote in Chi, IL... early and often.   We will be reviewing Dirty Beaches' critically acclaimed double LP Drifters/Love Is The Devil shortly.

DIRTY BEACHES



Photo Credit: Anna Zelikova

Dirty Beaches' Drifters/Love Is The Devil has been one of the standout records of 2013 so far, receiving a Best New Music from Pitchfork and rave reviews across the board. The man behind the project, Alex Hung-Tai Chang, has asserted himself as one of the most dynamic and exciting artists making music at the moment.   

Now for the first time since the album's release on Zoo Music, he'll be touring North America with his full band. The show is electric and brings to life this complex and beautiful collection of songs as captured here in the recent video for Casino Lisboa.


Dirty Beaches has announced a full North American tour this fall in celebration of his acclaimed new double album, Drifters/Love Is The Devil, out now on ZOO MUSIC. He'll also be releasing a special, limited edition tape only version of the double record while on tour.

The solo project of Alex Huang Hungtai, Dirty Beaches has perhaps surprised his already familiar audience of fans with Drifters/Love Is The Devil, a double record that toes the line between his carefully refined rockabilly sound and one that leads more towards instrumental film scores, characterized by intensely beautiful and often melancholy emotion. The artist went on NPR recently to discuss the new double record and some of its influences and history, called "washy, dreamy rock music that often feels nostalgic." 

Meanwhile, Pitchfork glowingly discussed the record in their Best New Music album review, calling it, "both sprawling and detailed, a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights...Drifters/Love Is the Devil is more robust and eccentric than anything he's ever released before."


Remaining North American Tour Dates 2013 /

09.12.13 - Empty Bottle - Chicago, IL # 
09.13.13 - Firebird - St. Louis, MO #
09.14.13 - Exit In - Nashville, TN #
09.15.13 - Bottletree - Birmingham, AL #
09.17.13 - The Mohawk - Austin, TX #
09.19.13 - Rhythm Room - Phoenix, AZ #
09.20.13 - Echo - Los Angeles, CA # %
09.21.13 - The Void - San Diego, CA # %
09.22.13 - Bottom of the Hill - San Francisco, CA # %
09.24.13 - Mississippi Studios - Portland, OR # %
09.25.13 - Barboza - Seattle, WA # %
09.26.13 - Biltmore Cabaret - Vancouver, BC # % 
* with Heathered Pearls, Xray Eyeballs
^ with Heathered Pearls & Eola (collaboration), Porcelain Raft, Andy Boay
# with Sisu
% with Chasms

Assets /


Alex Zhang Hungtai, AKA Dirty Beaches, started off as a one man band in 2005 in Montreal. A trans-pacific nomad and genre hopping sound smith, his past releases include drone instrumentals, film scores and a fascination with dissecting popular american music like blues, rockabilly, soul, RNB, and hip hop, often rendering them to the point where its no longer recognizable.

His latest release, Drifters/Love Is The Devil, is a double LP that chronicles the musician's life on the road over the past 2 years, 
as we follow him down the rabbit hole through the labyrinths of Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, and many other cities through heartbreak, rebirth and masochistic existential self reflection.
Recorded between Montreal and Berlin in the winter of 2012, the double LP is separated only by aesthetics, as they are tightly woven together thematically as one conceptual piece. If 2011's Badlands was an exercise in exorcising past ghosts in a semi-fictional world, then Drifters/Love Is The Devil is a reflection on the fragility of reality. One, of the surface world in which he explores the night life of bright neon temptations dwelling in hedonistic irresponsible values, and the other of the inner world, one of remorse and lovelorn tragedies.

As stated by the artist himself, "the most honest piece of music I've ever written." Drifters/Love Is The Devil is out now on ZOO MUSIC.


Drifters Tracklisting /
01. Night Walk
02. I Dream In Neon
03. Belgrade
04. Casino Lisboa
05. ELLI
06. Aurevoir Mon Visage
07. Mirage Hall
08. Landscapes In The Mist 
Love Is The Devil Tracklisting /
01. Greyhound At Night
02. This Is Not My City
03. Woman
04. Love Is The Devil
05. Alone At The Danube River
06. I Don't Know How To Find My Way Back To You
07. Like The Ocean We Part
08. Berlin 

Quotes /
"Both sprawling and detailed, a sonic travelogue that takes the textural aspects of his work to impressionistic heights." Pitchfork

"Washy, dreamy rock music that often feels nostalgic." NPR

"Ambitious new double album, Drifters/Love Is The Devil, stylishly reflects the dislocation of the road more traveled, hovering on the edge of dread...the oblique confessionals and elegiac atmosphere belie a certain cinematic grandeur." Interview Magazine

"A double album steeped in grainy nostalgia that ventures further into the heart of film noir...an Oscar-worthy soundtrack waiting to happen." NYLON

"Drifters sees Hungtai dabble in spartan post-punk, rickety industrial and devil-at-the-crossroads blues. Love Is The Devil, meanwhile, is an instrumental song-suite, alternately redolent of Angelo Badalamenti and Forest Swords." FACT

"This double album is really good, and Alex Zhang Hungtai rules." VICE

"It's a demanding, damn good and rewarding listen, one that squeezes your heart and head through shaking fingers." Filter

"Laying down a rattling, distortion-heavy foundation while the man spits semi-intelligible venom from a mouth that seems caught in a permanent rockabilly sneer. There are echoes of both Tonetta and Brian Eno, with hints of the utter nothing that awaits us at the end of this crushing existence." SPIN

"Drifters/Love is the Devil is a pair of poignant records. Hungtai’s ideas swing rapidly from beautiful to chaotic to completely atonal...Fortunately, Hungtai has let us into his world, no matter what darkness we might find there." Consequence of Sound

"The gloomy and beautiful tracks on Love is the Devil may be pointing a way forward for Dirty Beaches, they may have been conceived as a spiritual complement to Drifters, or they may just be a temporary detour; whatever their intent though, their presence is a welcome addition to the Dirty Beaches catalog." Paste

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