Trouble - Snake Eyes 7"

Fortunately this isn't the Christian metal band, but an one-off project between David Lynch's son Riley Lynch on guitar, Lynch's collaborator Dean Hurley on drums and Alex Zhang Hungtai (Dirty Beaches, Love Theme) on sax that performed the title track for the returning series of Twin Peaks. It's a good mood cabaret rock 'n' roll track that could have also appeared in an Aki Kaurismaki movie = perfection. But all the money is on side 2 "Mother's Gone," which is a slow dirge between the Twin Peaks movie's masterpiece track "The Pink Room" and early Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, that can be played on repeat all day, admiring those long accents by Hungtai's sax. Greatness. 2017 7" on Sacred Bones Records.

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Love Theme - Love Theme LP (Dirty Beaches)

This is another moniker used by Alex Zhang Hungtai since the abandonment of Dirty Beaches, where once more he plays the saxophone. Here he is accompanied by sax player Austin Milne and keyboardist Simon Frank. Unlike the free jazz of Âncora, the music here has a closer proximity to Dirty Beaches. Alex's old music always sounded to me like the deleted soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch's early films like Permanent Vacation or Stranger than Paradise, or even David Lynch's Eraserhead or Blue Velvet. The immense darkness and the mournful odes to lost love evoked by the slow crawl of the saxophones is contrasted with instances of outbursts of throbbing synths and drum machines which offer a surprisingly Blade Runner-ish cyberpunk vibe. Along with Watch Repair/Mystic Umbrellas' Journey to the West this is the strongest contender for album of the year. 2017 LP on Alter.

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