Dirty Beaches

Dirty Beaches is a guy named Alex Zhang Hungtai from Taiwan who, in his upbringing must have watched a lotta the movie "Grease". I saw him at SXSW this past spring break and he is a pretty cool cat, looks straight up like one of the T-Birds. Most times that I've seen him in pictures online, he's wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, Roy Orbison sunglasses, his hair is slicked back, and he's smoking a cigarette. He was the same way at the concert. He's definitely part of the whole new "chill wave" surf music bandwagon, but I think he makes a better/cooler attempt at it than other people. I think he does this by picking cooler surf rock bands to model after. A lot of his songs are super surfy, with low-fi guitars and rumbles. Over the songs are his deep and echoey croons, which sound to me like a mix of Elvis' deep voice and Lux Interior, singer of the 70's psychedelic rock band, the Cramps. Dirty Beaches seems to incorporate 70's punk, 1940's doo-wop, psychedelic surf rock, and maybe some Elvis. To me, it's interesting that a kid born and raised in Taiwan would be exposed to the kind of music that influenced him to make the songs he does today. I think his best song is "Lord Knows Best", which samples an old French song by Francoise Hardy. Below are two songs by him, "Lord Knows Best" and "True Blue". With those, I also included the unique voice of Lux Interior from the Cramps, and a Roy Orbison song, who was a big part of doo-wop.