(pair of mirrors)

Beirut - “My Night With the Prostitute from Marseille”

Realpeople Holland

Beirut is a wild little band with a Mid-Eastern name, Balkan folk and French chanson influences, which sometimes also makes forays into mild electronica. It’s actually quite hard to pinpoint the quintessential Beirut “sound,” because each new album or EP that Zach Condon comes up with sounds very little like its predecessor. Gulag Orkestar, the Balknan-inspired first album, established Beirut as the band that boldly employs the most eclectic and rambunctious collection of instruments in both their recordings and live shows (ukulele, flugelhorn, viola). The album, which came out in 2005, draws heavy parallels to the Decemberists (Picaresque, 2005), Sufjan Stevens (Illinois, 2005), New Pornographers (Twin Cinema, 2005), and Arcade Fire (Funeral, 2004), bands that were all testing and expanding the music horizons of their listeners around this time (and continue to do so) through fearless and unorthodox use of musical instruments and arrangements. The whole thing was really a bit of a movement, and it is small wonder that Condon recorded his second album, The Flying Cup Club (2007), at the Arcade Fire studio in Montreal, and contributed vocals and instrumentals to the New Pornographers’ 2010 release, Together. 

Beirut’s recent statement of their music, and perhaps the most interesting one, came in 2009, with the release of the double EP March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland. While March of the Zapotec is your classic and brilliant Beirut, with all the flugelhorn you can handle (think the kind of music a wealthy French merchant would be getting drunk to in the 1600s), Realpeople Holland is almost its diametrical opposite. Forget Decemberists, forget Sufjan - the second EP sounds a lot closer to Memory Tapes or even LCD Soundsystem. The backing is almost exclusively synth; the beginning of “No Dice” sounds like a start to a bona fide pop song.And it is because of this that Realpeople Holland is instrumental to the development of Beirut - it shows that Beirut is about music at large rather than only about flugelhorns, and that their music can avoid genre complacency that plagues so many “niche” bands. At Bonnaroo 2011, I hope we get to witness both the sides of Beirut - on the one hand, the band as a collective French-horn wielding medieval bards, and on the other, the band as sleek and modern musicians that emerged on Realpeople Holland. 

(29 Days!) 

-L