Album review: Stateless
by Dirty Beaches
Distributed by Zoo Music
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be so easy.
Montreal experimental songwriter Alex Zhang Hungtai, best known under his moniker Dirty Beaches, released a somewhat slight collection of four ambient tracks as a follow-up to his sweeping double album Drifters / Love is the Devil. The tracks are gorgeous, but they don’t feel as instantly bold as previous albums.
A basic and common artistic narrative.
That is, until Hungtai announced on Twitter just a few days before the release of Stateless, “RIP DIRTY BEACHES 2005-2014 . . . TIME TO MOVE ON.”
(https://twitter.com/dirtybeaches808/status/526944145014022144) (https://twitter.com/dirtybeaches808/status/526944247778672641)
The context in which Stateless exists shifts is rapid and drastic. This is no longer just a few ambient pieces by a man who clearly knows how to craft an engulfing landscape of sound, but a final statement of a nearly decade-long project.
The project, which initially began as a lo-fi singer-songwriter experiment similar to that of Ariel Pink or John Maus, blew up in 2011 after the release of Badlands. It focused primarily around a 1950s greaser aesthetic.
Stateless takes not only a new sonic direction but a thematic one as well. Hungtai spent a majority of his life searching for a home, drifting place to place without any true purpose.
If Dirty Beaches initially found his home as a rough rider, retro-nostalgia project, it is now clear Hungtai is still unsure where, or if, he has a home.
The four tracks soar directionless with a stagnant feeling of loss. If Hungtai had a state, or at least convinced himself he had one, it is clear there is nothing anymore.
The record is also surprisingly cleaner than his previous work. While it is still not high definition by any means, the lo-fi recording quality and intentional audio clipping are nowhere to be found. Instead the primarily synth and saxophone focused album creates a nearly orchestral vibe.
The highlights of the album are easily the two longer tracks, “Time Washes Away Everything” and the title track. The former not only closes out the album, but Dirty Beaches entire catalogue, and feels like the perfect kind of hopeless goodbye with a slight hint of the promise that everything can heal on its own.
Stateless isn’t so much a farewell as a welcome to a new kind of project for Hungtai who promises a new project in 2015. Done with the state of his past, he feels lost. Hopefully he’ll keep looking for his state, whatever or wherever it is, and we’ll get to come and feel along with him the entire trip.
