Gentle, ambient, acoustic, meditative, often very beautiful and filled with inventive surprises, this unusual 18-track album by the American experimental band fronted by Zach Condon was commissioned, and complemented a show by idiosyncratic Stockholm-based contemporary circus group Kompani Giraffe. Thematically it’s a interpretation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky, journeying through eleven songs and seven extended instrumental themes, named after the lunar seas and inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations. The album follows 2023’s Hadsel, which saw Condon return from recovered his physical and mental health after pre-Covid career-threatening throat problems. Thankfully his pure, distinctive voice is in fine fettle, exposed in all its sensitive vulnerability, and accompanied by a variety of instruments from harpsichord, piano, harp, orchestral strings, guitar, his usual rotary-valve trumpet, flugelhorn and the ukulele, euphonium, mandolin, and accordion, all variously coming to the fore after the Tangerine Dream-ish opener Disappearances and Losses, into the gorgeous Forest Encyclopedia, Oceanus Procellarum, and then other standouts Villa Sacchetti and Mare Crissium, which take this form of chamber pop to an exquisite level. Across these beautiful, wistful melancholic melodies there are also echoes of The Magnetic Fields. The lead single on this seventh Beirut album is Caspian Tiger, accompanied by a video of the circus acrobats in full performance.
But the entire album is one of transportative beauty, from the syncopated rhythms of Mani’s 7 Books; the lovely waltz percussive shuffle and trumpets of Tuanaki Atoll, a track that explores a South Pacific paradise that strangely vanished in the 19th century; the tick-tocking, soaring Garbo’s Face; the staccato almost electro-pop of Guericko’s Unicorn'; all the way to the delicious strings and melody of closer Mare Tranquillitis. A delicately lovely release, wide in scope, poetic, imaginative, and among his finest to date. Out on Pompeii Records and Beirutband.com
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