A brass band is all you need to set the soundtrack of a lifespan: the pain and the fight, the celebration and the mourning, the love and the ridiculousness of it all. And Balkan brass bands, having absorbed a sizeable chunk of the world into their rich itinerant histories, take these all up to a higher level. Beirut’s Zach Condon taps into these tapestries of sounds and stories for his first album, a lovely and melancholy ride, called Gulag Orkestar.
With the unfurling of the trumpet on the opening title track, listeners embark on a voyage laid out in song titles and musical influences, through bunkers and canals, floating from Germany to Italy to Slovakia. It’s a sound simultaneously new and old, a winning combination of familiar pop and tangled old-world roots of Balkan brass, which itself calls forth everything from Europe east and west to Turkey, with strains from Mexico, klezmer and spaghetti western shaken and stirred in. With incredible instinct, Condon melds all this with the inward-looking nature of so-called indie rock and binds everything together with his foggy, pliant voice and the simple power of a ukulele.
The best and most memorable songs include “Postcards from Italy” and the lilting “Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)” and are perhaps the ones that retain the most individuality and understandable lyrics. While you might not always understand what Condon is singing, it’s clear that his cloud-tinged voice, with its ability to carry over as well as transform its surroundings, is integral to Beirut’s sound. In “Scenic World,” for example, his wistful words, “I try to imagine a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking,” soften the playful boops that resemble the silly presets on an old-school Casio keyboard. Many of the other tracks are more cinematic in scope, setting down a scene or a feeling, but not quite giving us the arc of a narrative or the focus to hold onto them.
If Gulag Orkestar doesn’t find the frantic, rambunctious energy that Balkan brass can also supply, it may be the simple fact that Condon is practically a one-man band on the recording, though helpful support is supplied by Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Handsaw). Live, this music might find an intriguing swagger from a larger ensemble.
At the core though, the album remains pensive, whiffs of it liable to remind you of any number of things. The accordion’s oom-chug-chug might take you back to your grandparents’ polka or the quirky stylized make-believe of Amelie. The strange nostalgia inspired by the record is not necessarily for places and times that existed but for invisible cities and times you didn’t know you missed too. That Condon is still a teenager is hard to believe, for this nineteen-year-old seems to know something about the world and its wanderings. The road was home to the Roma, or the Gypsies, and in Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar, we suddenly find ourselves there too, at home and on a voyage all at once. |