In April of last year, Zachary Condon posted a mystifying message on the Web site of his intercultural music project, Beirut. He cancelled the group's tour and said he was in need of a creative shift: "It's come time to change some things, reinvent some others, and come back at some point with a fresh perspective and batch of songs," he wrote. "I promise we'll be back, in some form." Now Beirut has returned -- and indeed some things have changed.
Condon hollowed out a niche for himself in 2006 as the only 20-year-old "indie rocker" making records that sounded like a French chansonnier crooning over a Balkan gypsy ensemble. Two albums, three EPs and at least one musical crisis later, Beirut is back with the gripping "March of the Zapotec / Holland EP" (2009).
Rather than forging an ethnic sound with hired hands in a New Mexico studio (or bedroom) as had been his habit, Condon decided to embed himself for "Zapotec." He traveled to southern Mexico last year to play with the Jimenez Band, a 19-piece Oaxacan brass outfit. The results are exciting and, of course, surprising.
While listening to these six tracks and thinking about how they were made, I couldn't prevent Paul Simon's "Graceland" (1986) from springing to mind. Like Condon, Simon has long had a penchant for drawing on various foreign styles. He'd never been nearly as ambitious as he was in making his mid-'80s comeback record. Simon ventured into South Africa during the apartheid to record what would become his magnum opus.
Drawing on local African musicians as well as some Americans, Simon crafted a sound that is as timeless as it is unclassifiable. The album shakes and shuffles with African pop's snare-drum rhythms, shimmers with the jangle of lead guitars, and shrieks with the urgent background vocals of the Gaza Sisters (who sing in their native Tsonga on the chorus to the unbearably danceable "I Know What I Know"). At the same time, "Graceland" sounds like Simon's record: it's still his silky, reassuring voice; his songwriting; his brainchild.
The same goes for Condon. He wrote the songs on "Zapotec," and the lush horn arrangements, while distinctly Latin American, are not as far divorced from his neo-Balkan orchestrations as one might expect. It does feel more organic than "Graceland," which was influenced and recorded by South African musicians but is essentially an '80s-pop record. This is largely because Beirut was never an indie-rock band so much as a cultural-music experiment. Then there's Condon's voice. Its thickness and operatic flair recall Charles Aznavour, the so-called French Frank Sinatra, and this feels appropriate on top of European gypsy music, all mournful accordion and French horn. But when the instrumentals remind us of Mariachi, it's more of a stretch. That's okay -- Beirut is not trying to sound like any old band here, it's trying to sound like an experimental, young New Mexican one in Mexico. And at that, it succeeds with ease.
Lyrically, both Condon and Simon largely stick to their guns on these albums. The former pieces together dramatized verses, often of mostly incomplete sentences, and makes up for their inconsistent quality with a presentation that is both emotive and so theatrical that it often renders the words indistinguishable. Simon, on the other hand, has never been better at delving into human weakness and need with both his soft-voiced presentation and his understated poetry than he is on "Graceland."
"She comes back to tell me she's gone," he sings on the title track. "As if I didn't know that, as if I didn't know my own bed/ As if I'd never noticed the way she brushed her hair back from her forehead."
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Giovanni Russonello is a junior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Giovanni.Russonello@tufts.edu.
