What does passing time look like?
It’s 7:45 PM and I’m starting to close up shop at the small record store I “work” at. It’s hardly work; I get paid to sit at a counter and listen to music all day. On this particular day I’ve been sent a copy of Dirty Beaches’ new double album Drifters/Love Is the Devil. I put it on about 15 minutes before I close the store and clean up, which is a weird time to listen to a double LP. I end up unplugging my phone from the store’s sound system halfway through “Elli”, a bouncing, icy cut inspired by Suicide from the first half of the album. The first five songs on the record remind me a lot of Dirty Beaches last album Badlands, a record that resonated with me heavily and still to this day gets regular rotation on my record player at home. It’s the kind of music suited for the time of day when the sun’s natural light is fighting for dominance with every neon-lit bar sign on Earth.
Now it’s 10:20 PM and I’ve been home from work for two hours now. Through the very short drive home and continuous nervous shifting under the blankets in my bed I’ve listened to this solemn 75-minute lo-fi album once tonight. Since the playlist holding the song on my computer ended I’ve been sitting in relative silence for the better part of an hour, flipping between aimless Tumblr browsing and rejecting every movie that comes up in my Netflix queue. Drifters/Love Is the Devil taunts me from a separate window, and I’m tempted to listen to it again. But it doesn’t feel right. Not here, not now.
Something about the rough textures and inaccessible songwriting of Alex Zhang Hungtai’s newest album make me uncomfortable listening to it in the dingy, unlit atmosphere of a basement apartment. Inspired by and written during a grueling international tour that took Dirty Beaches through various European and Asian cities, Drifters/Love Is the Devil is a record about the anguish of travel; the unspoken dense emotions that people pretend don’t exist when they’re supposed to be doing something fun. Homesickness, anxiety, ostracism, aimlessness, and everything else that goes along with being away from home.
It’s 7:01 PM on March 14th and I’m walking across Austin, Texas with a group of friends. I’m having the time of my life, but I feel awful and I can’t explain why. I tweet something at myself to try and fix it. It doesn’t work. I haven’t even heard Drifters/Love Is the Devil yet but in a couple of months I’ll recognize the rambling synth organ melody of “I Don’t Know How to Find My Way Back to You” as a direct reflection of how my brain felt at the time. It has no lyrics or discernible melody, but the vivid sense of space it creates and how it relates to such a specific emotional state is uncanny. I snap out of it.
It’s now roughly 11:45 PM and I’m driving along the Columbia River in Northern Oregon. Looking across the thick darkened water towards the other shore there’s a wooden boat dock with a red-orange light illuminating a small sphere of space around it. “That’s what it feels like to think about difficult things,” I’m saying to myself. It reminds me of last summer when I couldn’t sleep. I’d stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning, browsing unsecured webcams through Google and watching things happen live from around the world. Traffic cameras from Japan, college campuses in central Europe, deserted highways in Montana. It was mindless, pointless, and pseudo-poetic, but it helped to pass the time.
Love Is the Devil, the second half of Dirty Beaches’ new record, has no lyrics or recognizable rhythm. The songs range from sinister and discordant (“Woman”) to textural and affecting (“Berlin”). Each one feels like every emotion you’ve experienced at once lumped into an overwhelming pile. There are few musicians today who can work in such subtle territory and still bring about intense, visceral reactions. Love Is the Devil was reportedly composed during the off-hours of a recording studio in Berlin, where solitude and silence dominate. It’s easily the more mature and accomplished half of the record.
“Alone at the Danube River,” a 7 minute solo improvisational piece for guitar, lies at the center of Love Is the Devil. It dances around cold, distant reverb, repeating variations of the same melody in a mournful, dirge-like pattern. Eventually the guitar is suffocated under a layer of warm, synthesized fluttering strings. It feels like the sun breaking over the horizon. It’s the kind of music that soundtracks devastating loss followed by a glimmer of hope. It feels like everything moving in slow motion and reverse, unraveling a portion of your day with each repeated listen.
I don’t travel much outside of the Pacific Northwest, so the exact feelings that inspired the creation of this record are foreign to me. But when I listen to Drifters/Love Is the Devil, it feels like I’m a thousand miles from home surrounded by strangers. It’s uncomfortable, conflicted, and anxious. I hope I never have to go through what led to this album, but I’m extremely thankful that it exists. I still haven’t figured out what time passing looks like, but now I know how it sounds.
Drifters/Love Is the Devil is available now on Zoo Music.
