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Beirut Gulag Orkestar Released in 2006 9.4/10 Styles European Folk Singer/Songwriter Electronica (just a little) Song Highlights Prenzlaurberg Postcards From Italy The Canals of Our City |
Zach Condon's (aka Beirut) debut release Gulag Orkestar managed to receive a pretty impressive ammount of pre-release hype, thanks to music-blogs across the internet praising it as the next Neutral Milk Hotel and Condon himself as the next Jeff Mangum. This comparison can be chalked up fifty percent to the album's curious instrumentation and vocals and fifty percent to the indie-music community's desperate need for a new messiah. To be frank, Gulag Orkestar doesn't really sound much like anything Mangum and co ever created. That being said, this is most definitely a really great album by one of indie rock's most fascinating new voices. So, addressing exactly why Beirut isn't the next Neutral Milk Hotel should also give you a decent idea as to exactly how the music sounds. Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was complemented by strong flourishes of European folk music which helped to shape the album's sound, but at its core the album's strongly guitar-led sound made it clearly an American indie rock/folk release (albeit an unconventional one). Gulag Orkestar does not contain a single moment of guitar, neither acoustic nor electric, and therein lies the first big difference. The European sounds which ran through Aeroplane absolutely saturate Condon's debut, with every song being an incredibly dense mix of organ, horns, strings, acordian and ukulele, to name only a few. The only departure from this style comes with the album's two brief forays into electronica, the Postal Service style bleeps of "Scenic World" and the dreamy glitched loops of "After the Curtain." These detours aside, though, the music bears a much closer relation to Elephant 6 associate A Hawk and a Hacksaw, the European-themed side project of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeremy Barnes. This certainly makes a lot of since, since Barnes himself is a musical contributer on Gulag Orkestar. The next big difference is in the voices. While Jeff Mangum's appeal was in his impassioned, vastly imperfect wail, Condon's vocals are broad and deep. His smooth, resonant timbre could more accurately be compared to someone like Antony (of The Johnsons), with every warm note being held and stretched before its follower. So, it doesn't really sound like Neutral Milk Hotel at all. The comparisons are mindless. Got that? Good. Let's move on. Gulag Orkestar also has a really good story behind it. I'm not talking about any narrative within the album itself - I'm talking about how the album came to be. See, Zach Condon is a highschool dropout. He left school at the age of fifteen and decided to travel through Europe. The story goes that he was so taken by the musical heritage of Russia, that he decided he just had to write a big, sprawling epic of a concept album about the gulag. Upon completion of Gulag Orkestar Condon was just nineteen years old. Keep that in mind when you're listening. It's not that the quality of the album demands it be taken into consideration. Just that you probably won't believe the guy who's singing is really that young, as Condon's beautiful vocals and amazing musical maturity seem so unlikely given his youth. What sort of music were you writing when you were nineteen? Another curious idiosynchrasy of this album is Condon's love of the humble ukulele, an instrument that doesn't generally get much of a showing in the indie scene. On Gulag Orkestar, it sits front and centre on almost every track, carrying the song's main melody, while lending it a beautiful fragility which is extremely affecting (and never twee in the slightest). Being affecting seems to be Gulag Orkestar's biggest strongpoint, as each of the album's standout tracks managed to evoke a strong emotional response from me. Be it the fanfare of the title track, the dramatic horns and powerful group vocals of "Prenzlaurberg," the upbeat prettiness of "Postcards From Italy" or the painfully beautiful vocal delivery of "The Canals of Our City," Gulag Orkestar delivered more than its share of spine tingling moments. There's even some sampled applause which drift over the second half of "After the Curtain," the album's closing track - a move which would usually be written off as a tremendously insincere cliche, yet here it manages to sound genuinely celebratory, making for a truly lovely finale. Gulag Orkestar really is an unexpected gem of an album. Such skill and maturity being displayed by such a young artist really is a marvel. If this is the sort of thing he can produce for a debut, then I greatly anticipate what creations he'll deliver with some experience under his belt. A must-hear album. |