ATP The Fans Strike Back Preview 2 - Beirut

"Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think."

That's Zach Condon talking, from this 2006 interview, and it pretty much sums up what I love about Beirut. Raucous drunken trumpets mixed with that voice of longing make a beautiful mix. I like what he has to say about writing lyrics in the same interview:

You're not actually a big fan of writing lyrics.

ZC: No, not really. It's the joy of writing the song and melody and all that stuff that comes naturally to me.

And so the lyrics are filled with the same quality as the trumpets, nothing intellectualized, you don't need to pay close attention to them, they add to the atmosphere of the music without breaking it, creating music to get carried away to. Carried away elsewhere, perhaps an effect of the traditional instrumentation and the European feel, although the same feelings are carried by the Holland EP, where the sound is more synth, so to simply hook the feeling onto an exoticism of place or an authenticity of sound would seem to be a mistake.
The Flying Club Cup is just about as perfect album as you're likely to get as far as I'm concerned. Listening to it now as I write this and I keep finding myself stopping, just taken away somewhere else on the flow of words caressed by the sweetest of sounds. I think the reason I love it so much more than the latest double EP is because it carries the atmosphere throughout the album, building and building the atmosphere, lyrical themes and phrases returning over and over, never allowing the surrounding mundanity (I listen to it a lot at work) to encroach until the last note dies away and the normality returns, but a sweeter normality. March of the Zapotec/Holland, is more disconnected, not only in the shortness of the two parts, but between songs, this interview explains that someway; on March of the Zapotec:

It's funny, because it fit right in, actually. It felt like a giant leap, stylistically, which I found pretty interesting. I went down there with every intent of recording an entire album, but I was only there for two weeks, and we ended up doing only a couple songs fully down there, and then they recorded bits and pieces to some other things I had going on. But this thing is actually recorded all over the place. I even recorded one song with Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear, in the Grizzly Bear church, with him playing saxophone. So, very scattershot recordings in between tours and stuff, and then I got to piece it all together at the end. After I went on a big trip to Morocco, I got to set out the track list, and choose what songs and stuff.

Ditto Holland:

There's actually only one song that predates the Beirut stuff. Let's say there's a month when I'm a little sick of hearing the songs I'm recording, I'll slink back to my parents' house and very quietly record these epic synth-pop tracks, and kind of clear the palette and get back into it. They're different aspects of my personality, I guess. It's a pretty ridiculous switcheroo, but if I do it all the time, I tend to edit a lot.

Which isn't to say they're not good, because they are, I guess it's just one of those age old things, following perfection...
So. I'm looking forward to seeing them at ATP you might say... And if these words are anything to go by, we should be in for a treat and maybe some stuff we haven't heard:

They have to be shows I'm excited about, there has to be a lot of new material that I'm actually behind. I don't know, I feel like we're all pretty fresh-faced at this point, which is much more exciting to go back into. Because we've never been the kind of grueling, punk band touring style anyways, so I think we'll kind of keep it to that. Special shows that we can be excited about, and not too much more, really.

And so to the video.
I'll start with one of the tracks off the March of The Zapotec Ep. Just to show I do love it really, and to show that the tracks on it are damn good. This is "La Llorona", quality video too:



Now for one off The Flying Club Cup - Nantes, performed walking down some stairs, collecting musicians as he goes...



There's one such video for every track off the album here.
Another from the same series, "A Sunday Smile"



Could just post every track, but will restrain myself. Here's "Postcards from Italy", off Gulag Orkestar, which in my reverie for The Flying Club Cup, I've sadly neglected here, but which is brilliant nonetheless



Finally, here's Zach Condon doing a cover of Grizzly Bear's "Knife", recorded at "the end of a nice drunken evening in Paris"



Having done this and listened to them while writing this, I am now really looking forward to seeing them...