Beirut

Track	Album
Mount Wroclai	Gulag Orkestar
Now I’m Gone	Artifacts
So Allowed	No No No
East Harlem	The Rip Tide
Nantes	The Flying Club Cup
La Llorona	March Of The Zapotec/Holland
Varieties Of Exile	Gallipoli
Prenzlauerberg	Gulag Orkestar
The Gulag Orkestar	Gulag Orkestar
Mare Humorum	A Study Of Losses

Beirut’s Zach Condon grew up in New Mexico, US, and started recording music in his teens to combat the boredom of nights troubled by insomnia. After dropping out of school, and inspired by watching way too many European films, he left America to travel around Europe. Here he hoovered up a dazzling array of musical influences that would whorl chaotically into the music he created when he returned to the US. In 2005, aged just 19, he fetched up supporting A Hawk and a Hacksaw, who purveyed a comparable brand of Balkan style folk and recorded Gulag Orkestar, an album that offered a refreshing new take on folk music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, featuring pianos, strings, accordions and brass, lots of brass. 

When I was 16 or 17, I was briefly infatuated by the Ukrainians, the Wedding Present spin off I’d heard on the John Peel show. I took advantage of my turn to play music in tutor period at school to showcase Hopak from their first album. Watching my classmates arrive in class merrily dancing to it in what they thought of as a ‘Ukrainian’ manner was a joyous moment. My first boyfriend appeared on the scene around this time and although we broke up and lost touch, he remembered this early obsession when I met him again almost twenty years later in the garden of my parents’ local pub. “There’s this amazing band I think you’ll love …” he said. 

A few days later I was playing Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar on repeat. At the time I lived in the Czech Republic and was going through a rather nasty breakup. From experience I can say that, if you’re unravelling mentally and tormented by self-loathing, you might as well do this in style by listening to Mount Wroclai (Idle Days) and trudging the Eastern suburbs of Prague. It doesn’t help the pain – if anything you feel it more keenly – but it’s the romance of it. Condon’s voice strains to warble this plaintive ode to what is, as far as I can determine, an imaginary mountain and it’s as elegiac as music gets.  

I’m not sure exactly where Now I’m Gone fits chronologically in Beirut’s timeline, but it must have been early because it came out on the Artifacts collection of formative recordings released in 2022. At this point in the late Covid era, we were spending a lot of time on the M1 stuck in traffic beside miles upon miles of that inexplicable purple piping that seems to accompany any motorway roadworks in the UK whilst playing this song. In the sleeve notes for this album, Condon talks about the making of these early recordings with a refreshing candour. He says of this number, “I wanted it to sound like it was bleeding”. Inasmuch as a song can sound like it’s bleeding, this is pretty much there. The bloodletting may not be quite as terminal as it is in Mount Wroclai, but chances of survival are slim to negligible, I would say. That it’s done to a chirpy drum beat and a cacophony of brass makes it all the more impressive.  

When Beirut’s fourth studio album, No No No, came out in 2015, the band was topping a list I’d made of bands I shamefully hadn’t yet seen live and really wanted to, so it was gratifying to finally be able to do this at their Brixton Academy gig in the September. The concert was glorious and I was particularly taken by the guy who, up until this moment, has resided in my head with the moniker of beardy-guy-with-beanie-hat-and-angelic-voice, though I’ve just done some digging and he turns out to be Kyle Resnick, who has also played with The National and Taylor Swift. If anyone was to forensically investigate my iPod (such things still existed back then) they might be puzzled by my tendency to keep swiping back to the bit just over two minutes into So Allowed wherethe pace shifts slightly and the brass kicks in.“I want to say you’re mine,” intones Condon in his trademark mournful tones. At least I think that’s what he’s saying – one of the features of Beirut’s music is muffled lyrics, with Condon quoted as saying “if I could change one thing in this world, music wouldn’t have words”. And it’s true, you don’t listen to Beirut for the lyrics, but voices are integral to the sound. The mumbled words in this love song lend it a kooky awkwardness that combines with the sublime music to make it all the more charming. 

East Harlem from 2011’s The Rip Tide had me puzzled for some time. I couldn’t work out how so many of the distinctly different refrains that got stuck in my head as an earworm all came from the same track. I’ve therefore always thought of this song as offering two or three tunes for the price of one. It builds a melody around understated brass, ukulele and accordion, then pauses and pivots, gently morphing from one song into another while still maintaining a coherent whole. Concerted YouTube research will reveal versions that spin off in entirely different directions from the recorded one, giving possibly infinitesimal permutations of this song, which represents extremely good value for money.  

The song I always catch myself singing by the printer at work is Nantes from The Flying Club Cup album. I spent a lot of time watching the Take-Away Show version of this which features an impromptu concert on a street in France, complete with someone playing drums on a couple of wheelie bins. Although somewhat contrived, I can’t help but cherish the conceit of it. In this collection of videos, Zach casually chats in French to some of the people around him. From what I can gather, the man speaks at least Portuguese, French and Turkish, downplaying his linguistic skills as mere ‘parroting’. Yet, as an amateur linguist, I know you don’t get good at a language without some considerable determination, which makes me all the more in awe of him. The album version of this song also features a sample that it took some while to identify as a clip from the film of La Bête Humaine – a nice touch for cinephiles. 

My partner has a theory that each Beirut album focuses on music from a different part of the world – he posits that Gulag Orkestar is influenced by Eastern Europe, The Flying Club Cup is French, Zapotec more in the tradition of Mariachi. I’m less into categories and prefer to see Beirut’s albums simply as Beirut processing whatever musical influences Zach Condon has collected from his most recent peregrinations. 2009’s March Of The Zapotec and Real People Holland was, in keeping with these theories, based on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s a double album, of which I infinitely prefer the brassy side (Real People Holland) to the more plinky plonky disco side. The pick of the songs is La Llorona – featuring patiently plodding staccato brass. This is not the brass you find the Salvation army playing in supermarkets at Christmas, however. It clearly owes more to the Mexican influences on this album, but it’s also not a million miles from the kind of music you’d find on the streets of Belgrade and popularised by the likes of Boban Marković and Fanfare Ciocărlia either.

We saw Beirut in Leeds around about the time Gallipoli, a quieter album, came out. In Varieties Of Exile, the big brass sounds of yore are banished in favour of a ukulele. My brother argues that the ukulele is a crap instrument, but this song proves this to be completely unfounded. Condon strums for all he’s worth and as the song builds, beanie guy comes in with weird harmonies (think a pared down version of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy) that shouldn’t work, but somehow do, before the brass makes a fleeting appearance at the end.

I have a small bone to pick with Beirut in that not only are most of the lyrics completely mumbled but – as far as I can make out – the name of the song is rarely mentioned in them. This drives me insane. Fair enough to do it now and then, but how in God’s name are we meant to remember which song is which when they’re all named after places whose names don’t even feature in the lyrics? Prenzlauerberg is a case in point. An accordion tiptoes beneath more heartbreaking wailing from Condon and we find ourselves wandering the streets of … okay, we find ourselves wandering the streets of Prenzlauer Berg, maybe it does work after all.

Right, call a doctor, we’re bleeding again. The Gulag Orkestar, from the album of the same name, is about as heartrending as it gets. This song occupies a similar sonic terrain to my favourite advert of all time – Metz’s Judderman from 2000 – in which an unsuspecting adventurer is lured through the woods into a strange lair to drink a bottle of Schnapps that freezes him right through and turns him into a puppet. In the spirit of the recent coupling of Nosferatu with Radiohead’s music, I tried running this through my headphones while watching this cautionary tale on screen and it worked a treat. 

2023’s Hadsel, made in Norway after Condon cancelled his 2019 tour, and 2025’s A Study Of Losses are beautiful albums. They do not, however, yield up many of my toppermost songs. The exception being Mare Humorum, where lyric naysayer Condon ditches words in favour of oohs and aahs atop the sound of an acoustic guitar. The words may be few and far between, but the voices are essential to making it work. Strings and a flute build on the main sound, invoking a completely different musical landscape to that of earlier works. It’s blatantly still Beirut though. 

Our local bar has a vinyl night every month where you can expect to be shouted down by the owner for playing pretty much anything other than sludgy grunge. Imagine our surprise then, when we played Beirut the other week and were greeted by enthusiastic praise: “You don’t hear enough Beirut,” he said. And it’s true, you don’t.

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Johanna Breen lives in Exeter, UK. She likes dark, brooding music and anything with an East European bent.

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