Tonight’s Concert Pick: Dirty Beaches at First Unitarian Church

Lo-fi is the new hot sauce of modern music; you can add it to anything. Take any standard genre that needs a little kick and record it with heavy reverb (and/or add some low-end synths) and you have a brand-new sound. That approach has certainly worked for Dirty Beaches (the stage name of Alex Zhang Hungtai), which sounds like ’50s rock and roll recorded on warped cassettes. “True Blue”—off the most recent album, Badlands—sounds like an Elvis ballad, while “Sweet 17” has drawn comparisons to Jerry Lee Lewis. Along with the reverbed lo-fi, Hungtai adds a creepy Lynchian melancholy to his songs (he cites the director’s films Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, and Lost Highway as his primary influences for Badlands). Interestingly, Hungtai has said that the lo-fi is more a product of his lack of resources than an aesthetic choice; he hopes that, as his popularity grows, he’ll be able to afford to record with higher-quality equipment. Dirty Beaches performs with Lantern at 8 p.m. at First Unitarian Church; tickets to the all-ages show are SOLD OUT.

Also playing: the Deftones + Dillinger Escape Plan, Funeral Party at Electric Factory (8 p.m., SOLD OUT); The Twilight Singers + Margot And The Nuclear So And So’s at The Trocadero (8 p.m., all ages, $19)