Zach Condon—indie’s boy wonder. With his second LP released just after turning 21, he’s been turning heads left and right as a musical adventurer, taking us to the Balkan peninsula with his first album, and now to the streets of Paris with his latest album, “The Flying Club Cup.”
Yes, the trumpet is still there, as well as his stellar accompanying band, but the album certainly has a different feel, set more in a French chason style – you can picture yourself dancing outside a Paris café on a warm summer night.
“Cliquot” offers, along with Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste, offers a mournful song of longing. “Forks and Knifes (La Fête)” brings beautiful strings in to accompany a standard waltz. “Nantes,” the second track and pinnacle of the album, showcases Condon’s gorgeous voice (as do all of his songs) atop a passive organ sound, soon accompanied by the usual from Beirut.
The Flying Club Cup is pretty straightforward—it shows that Beirut is not just a Balkan-influenced project, yet at the same time shows that Beirut can still retain a somewhat distinctive sound (and not just because the songs have a trumpet in them). It is an album that you can listen to more than once and not get bored with, because it does what it has to do and it does it well. It certainly won’t be pinned as a classic, and is probably just a small view into the realm of what Zach Condon is capable of. He has a long way to go in his musical career, and if we can expect pretty music such as this so early on, I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us later.
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