Dirty Beaches, a.k.a. Alex Zhang Hungtai, is playing in Montreal tonight at Casa Del Popolo.
We had the opportunity to check him out at
Echoplex in Los Angeles (by the way - great venue, but very unfriendly and blasé staff) recently, during the West Coast leg of his current tour.
We initally had good expectations of what the L.A. show would be about after reading the positive
Pitchfork review. Unfortunately, the performance was pretty blah and we can say with confidence that we expect Dirty Beaches to remain a marginal act and here are the reasons why:
- It's basically one-man show with an Asian Elvis lookalike.
- Having enough stage presence to keep your audience entertained when you're alone on stage poses as a big challenge, even when your set design includes projections of close-up black and white shots of random people during your entire set (we actually enjoyed this part).
- Failure to connect with the audience - after a while, we decided to focus on our alcohol intake instead of the music.
- Boring songs... we enjoyed the opening act Bell Gardens more, we even bought some of their merch!
*Not an actual picture of Dirty Beaches frontman - I took it from Yoshi Suzuki's Asian Elvis myspace page... but you get the idea.
Let's just say that we advise you to save those 8$ - or spend it on a pint at one of the many watering holes in the Mile-End/Laurier area. Cheers.
