The Temple of the Neon Gods of Lost Youth
Alex Zhang Hungtai’s meaningful nod to my favorite Canto Rockers
A lost blog post somewhere in the deep dark woods of my buried archive was about Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches expressing his love for Hong Kong’s reclusive analog noise band The Offset: Spectacles. When my retina-scanning spiders found their way into their basement, they were as puzzled and lost in the language as us. I never approached deciphering their poetry. But it was a beautiful amalgam of Suicide and Sonic Youth, except less polished and more jagged. It was our favorite discovery of the year back then and it made us enormous fans.
But Dirty Beaches did not stay idle all this time. In fact, in a very welcoming surprise, Alex collaborated with his favorite canto psychics on the closing track of his latest EP Neon Gods Of Lost Youth. It is called “廟街 (Temple)” and it sounds like amnesia exacerbated by an obsessive-compulsive disorder of painting on your stomach using your dead grandma’s acrylic artificial nails. We cannot go a day without it now nevertheless.
