A new year and a tidy point in time to start making a new bracket. By something of a NY resolution I decided this year to listen to less pop music and investigate other ‘interesting’ sounds. What I have discovered so far is more pop, although the first bona fide discovery of the year can be classified in the Hypnogogic pop lump. So it is pop music but not pop music quite as we know it.

Something of a Pacific beatnik hipster complete with plaid shirt Dirty Beaches sounds, and it always is the sound to which is returned, like it’s excavated from vintage 1950’s era America from a time when ‘all was swell’ but as the sound has been hauled through time it has picked up quite a bit of noise and lo-fi distortion.

Dirty Beaches can croon and be maudlin like few have in recent years but can also hurtle along wild and white knuckle. And this is where Dirty Beaches sounds like something of an Elvis/Iggy Pop fusion with the sound of Suicide playing along. This add to an interesting concoction, for a lot of the carefree that we may automatically associate with the 1950’s is lost from Dirty Beaches and the dark night of that era comes out.