Beirut: The Flying Club Cup

As Beirut's 2006 debut, Gulag Orkestar, flew completely under my radar, I came in with no expectations (save for the enthusiastic recommendations of a friend) upon listening to The Flying Club Cup, thus setting the stage for me to be thoroughly blown away. The latest effort from 21-year-old wunderkind Zach Condon and his rotating cast of performers captures all the sweeping romanticism of the French countryside and the quaint charm of the Italian piazza, adds a healthy dose of lush instrumentation and a pinch of world-weariness, and bottles it into one extraordinary 40-minute listening experience. Owen Pallet, aka Final Fantasy, contributes string arrangements to many of the tracks, and lends his vocals to the gorgeous "Cliquot," which, drenched in layers of dark, operatic harmonization, marks one of the album's finest moments. The story goes that Beirut appeared on Owen Pallet's new album in exchange for the use of Arcade Fire's Masonic church studio and their never-ending toybox of instruments. The result is an album that sounds as full and overflowing as anything the Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene ever conceived, but that also captures an intimacy seldom found in the world of the freeform collective. Rousing opener "Nantes" is an anthem in construction but a personal affair at heart, each instrument's crescendo honing the focus more and more on Condon's soaring vocal delivery. It is this juxtaposition of the grandiose and the personal that lies at the center of Condon's work, making The Flying Club Cup worthy of many critics' end-of-year top ten lists.

Beirut- Nantes
Beirut- Cliquot

The great minds over at La Blogotheque, the genius behind Take Away Shows, have recorded the entire album in the form of a series of some of the best Take Away Shows to date. Alternate versions of "Nantes" and "The Penalty" are available on the main website as regular entries in the blog's concert series, but the entire set of The Flying Club Cup shows can be found at flyingclubcup.com.