The Lonesome Song Of a One-Man Band

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The New York Sun

Everybody loves a boy wonder. Zach Condon, the 21-year-old singer and composer who leads the group he calls Beirut, established himself as just that with the 2006 release of “Gulag Orkestar” (Ba Da Bing), which emerged from the blogosphere and knocked the indie pop world sideways. Basically a one-man band with a lot of side musicians, Mr. Condon channeled his teenage enthusiasm for Balkan brass band music into a shaggy-dog song cycle that reveled in its source’s ecstatic and melancholy mysteries.

It wasn’t that Mr. Condon was trying to pay homage or reinvent anything. He just loved the music he had heard sitting at home in New Mexico, and had experienced in person as a high school dropout and vagabond during various hitchhiking trips through Europe. He wanted to connect with it without really having to worry about a purist context. He might have just picked up a guitar, like some of his pals on the emo scene, but that would never have conveyed the sense of dislocation his music strives to reach.

“Gulag Orkestar” was ragged and gorgeously emotional, imbued with a deep sense of psychic exile. Much the same can be said for its sequel, “The Flying Club Cup,” even though Mr. Condon has ventured out of Serbia and Macedonia and taken up with the buskers on the boulevards of an imaginary Paris. Even though he’s getting his chanson on, his tone hasn’t changed much.

The new album, which arrives today, opens with “A Call to Arms,” a slow, fanfare of wobbly brass and droning accordion that slips slightly up-tempo into a lumbering processional. Mr. Condon’s wordless baritone glides in, soothing and sweet-sad, as if to lament, and then quickly moves on, leaving a piano tinkling in what sounds like a big, empty saloon. What appeals is not so much the lyrics, which Mr. Condon has admitted are a big worry. It’s the feeling he invests that matters.

The open frames of his songs leave a tremendous amount to the listener’s imagination. As if to compensate, Mr. Condon fills every track with a battery of instrumental nuance. There’s lots of twitch and thump, odd rhythms that stumble, and glimmering little bits of something or other. Though he works with friends like Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), who supplies some lovely string arrangements, Mr. Condon loves to fiddle around by himself. He takes up instruments he has no idea what to do with, like mandolin, ukulele, and squeezebox, and then does something with them. He’s a musical Swiss Army Knife.

The tactic lends a jaunty vibe to the album’s fourth track, “Guyamas Sonore,” which props up the singer’s half of a lover’s discourse. “The times we had / Oh when the wind would blow with rain and snow / Were not that bad / We put our feet just where they had to go.” The music’s antique feel makes it easy to think of the singer as a man stranded in central Europe sometime between the wars, faraway from someone he loves, writing a postcard he’ll never be able to send.

Oddly enough, given that Mr. Condon tinkers obsessively with every facet of his music (though perhaps somewhat predictably for a musician his age), “Flying Club Cup” doesn’t offer a lot of variation from song to song. There are bumptious brass outbursts and moments in which Mr. Condon sounds like his version of a 1930s crooner — or maybe just David Byrne in faux-operatic mode — but most songs resolve as waltzes or marches. They deny the immediate gratification of mainstream pop in favor of a sustained beatific gloom. It’s an album that insists you fall into its world, shambling and resplendent, heartsick and hungry for life.


The New York Sun

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