Beirut: The Flying Club Cup

BEIRUT: THE FLYING CLUB CUP (2007)

1) A Call To Arms; 2) Nantes; 3) A Sunday Smile; 4) Guaymas Sonora; 5) La Banlieue; 6) Cliquot; 7) The Penalty; 8) Forks And Knives (La Fête); 9) In The Mausoleum; 10) Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route); 11) Cherbourg; 12) St. Apollonia; 13) The Flying Club Cup.

One album and a few EPs into his career, «Beirut» goes west. Well, technically speaking, it is still east of New Mexico, but definitely west of the Balkans (where, as skeptical people tell me, Zachary Condon never actually set foot on his voyage of self-discovery): almost the whole album is ba­sed on the exotic country of France and its pictorially beautiful cities. The title is based on a suitably random bit of France-related trivia — a hot air balloon festival held in the early 1900's — and, totally true to the Santa Fe style, at least one song ('Guaymas, Sonora') deviates from the concept, being dedicated, mariachi-style, to Mexico, and the album cover, naturally, is an old photo shot of a Mexican beach. Putting a picture of a French paysage on an album paying tribute to French chanson? You'd call that true artistry? What are you, a Renaissance retrograde?...

And, of course, none of this sounds one bit like French chanson, despite all the accordeons and shit. Condon's travelog is well reflected in the lyrics, and his admiration for Jacques Brel, Fran­ce's biggest cultural export asset of the century, is also on record; but at the end of the day, The Flying Club Cup still ends up sounding like... Beirut. Listen to 'Cliquot': they sound like they're using this brass-accordeon punch to reproduce the structure of some old Celtic ballad from the deep depths of Condon's American subconscience. Bizarre.

Musically, the album's greatest advantage may be the smooth, but exuberant strings arrangements, courtesy of Owen Pallett who is mostly known as the orchestral mastermind behind Arcade Fire, but is also an accomplished solo artist in his own right; his waltzing intro to 'Forks And Knives' is my personal favourite moment on the whole record. But overall, despite the announced transition from the Dionysian wildness of Serbia to the Apollonic refinery of France, the changes in style are mostly cosmetic. Sonic texture and atmosphere still preside over hooks; Condon's vulnerably romantic, several-feet-above-the-ground vocals still bring to mind a shallower, more naïve and in­no­cent avatar of Andrew Bird; and the whole thing is still so damn cute and harmless that I do not understand how anyone could ever hate this kind of music (I think most of the hate letters in its address that I've seen were from silly people who actually expected it to sound like a collec­tion of French pop tunes circa 1920 or something).

One thing that is a little annoying is that most of the songs are taken at the same tempo, and way too many of them ('A Sunday Smile', 'Cliquot', 'Forks And Knives', 'Cherbourg') are waltzes — okay, folk mu­sic is not supposed to be diverse, but this is, after all, an advanced individual's processed take on folk music, and just how advanced can an individual be if he builds every third song of his upon the same POOM-cha-cha-POOM-cha-cha structure? (Let alone the fact that the nostalgia-tinted 'A Sunday Smile' may be the most sincerely moving tune on the album). I honestly do not en­dorse Condon's attitude towards rhythm; he seems to be too engulfed in the flow to flesh out the rhythmic work properly.

Still, by the time Condon leads us into the grand finale of the title track, he has, once more, con­vinced me that, in between the proverbially stale clichés of (and about) French folk culture and the grotesque, art-for-art's sake, meaningless concatenations of the «Santa Fe style», this whole thing is about the charismatic inner world of a sensitive young person, even if that world, in order to open up to strangers, requires to be fueled by completely random triggers. And so, once again, there may not be a whole lot of great music here, but there is sincerity — and intrigue — and that is enough to justify a friendly, if not ecstatic, thumbs up.

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Änglagård: Buried Alive

ANGLAGARD: BURIED ALIVE (1996)

1) Prolog; 2) Jordrök; 3) Höstsejd; 4) Ifrån Klarhet Til Klarhet; 5) Vandringar I Vilsenhet; 6) Sista Somrar; 7) Kung Bore.

A prog band just ain't a true prog band without an eighty-minute live LP under its belt; and even if Buried Alive was released as an afterthought, with the band already defunct for two years (the actual performance is from 1994's Progfest in Los Angeles), that does not make it any less of a «destiny fulfilled» symbol for the Swedish revivalists.

The track list is unmercifully stern: they reproduce all of Hybris, most of Epilog, and none of the cover tunes from their idols they occasionally allowed themselves to perform live (such as Ge­nesis' 'Musical Box', for in­stance) — come to think of it, that must have been a wise decision, be­cause the band's singing sucks even worse live than it does in the studio (this particular version of 'Klarhet' features some of the lamest off-key notes I've ever heard on any prog rock record, peri­od), and the sooner the world forgets about Tord Lindman's impersonation of Peter Gabriel, the better. Buried Alive sticks to its own guns, and let it stay that way.

Of course, it also means that, like all traditional prog bands leaning over to the symphonic rather than free-style ideology, the sole point of Buried Alive as an album is to prove that Änglagård's complexity can be and has been reproduced in a live setting with the exact same precision as it showed in the studio. The sound quality, I believe, could be slightly better — volume levels are not always properly adjusted, some instruments sometimes come out muffled, etc. — but overall, the quibbling is minor, so if your CD copy of Hybris ever rots down, rest assured that Buried Alive will still give you the same satisfaction.

On a sidenote, it is hard to refrain from noting that the «Progfest» in question, judging from the volume of the applause, must have been delighting an immense army of music lovers — no less than twenty, I'd say, and perhaps even all of a whoppin' fifty. Considering that, according to pub­licity descriptions, the LA Progfest draws progressive rock lovers from all over the world, I would guess that, be it «neo-prog», «retro-prog», or «prog-o'-the-prog», all of these new-fangled bands put together still would not match the popularity of a single classic Yes, Genesis, or Jethro Tull album — that most music lovers today would rather relisten to their stiff, preserved copies of Fragiles and Foxtrots than pay money to witness the living, breathing sounds of Echolyn, Anek­doten, and Minimum Vital. Which, as far as I'm concerned, should not make anyone sad — on the contrary, the more it stays this way, the more it helps ensure the status of Fragiles and Fox­trots as the stone cold classics they are, and I, for one, am a hopeless sucker for stone cold clas­sics. And what about Änglagård? They're all right, for about sixty minutes per year.

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The Art Of Noise: In No Sense? Nonsense!

ART OF NOISE: IN NO SENSE? NONSENSE! (1987)

1) Galleons Of Stone; 2) Dragnet; 3) Fin Du Temps; 4) How Rapid?; 5) Opus For Four; 6) Debut; 7) E.F.L.; 8) A Day At The Races; 9) Ode To Don Jose; 10) Counterpoint; 11) Roundabout 727; 12) Ransom On The Sand; 13) Rol­ler 1; 14) Nothing Was Going To Stop Them, Anyway; 15) Crusoe; 16) One Earth.

On their third album, Art Of Noise decided to hit it off the deep edge. Now reduced to the core duo of Dudley and Jeczalik, no chains prevented them of making the psycho-electronic equiva­lent to Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick: a sprawling, not-obviously-coherent mess of tunes, ef­fects, and ideas whose main point is «never let the listener understand where he is going to find himself the next moment».

My version of this album is not actually divided into sixteen tracks; just like the original CD versions of Thick As A Brick, it only contains two, and I have never given myself the trouble of trying to understand which sections of these two correspond to the sixteen «songs» listed on some of the editions — and I am pretty sure that the dynamic duo themselves never intended for any­ of their fans to waste time on that trouble. No single track on the album truly stands on its own; it all works as a single-breath fourty-minute Art Experience.

As usual, the saving grace, particularly for those who are not amused at the idea of art for art's sake, is «fun». Certain chunks don't go anywhere and are really quite boring (particularly the ones that go for that old «brea­thy moody» style of 'Moments In Love'), but every once in a while they bring out the brawny dance rhythms, inject them with samples of whatever they heard on TV the previous day, then interrupt and replace them with crap stuff any time they feel like it — then, as you start cursing under your breath, bring them back... for a while. In short, they cling on to their reputation as the arrogant hoodlums of sampling, and that counts.

The only single piece of it that stuck with audiences was, unsurprisingly, the band's rearrange­ment of the classic theme from the old TV show Dragnet (to serve as a modernized version for the 1987 movie), maybe out of sheer amazement that no significant pop artists since Ray Antho­ny in 1953 had ever wanted to ingrain it into the public conscience as much as, say, the Batman theme. The rearrangement is as fine as the theme itself (and pokes some concealed fun at the show's trappings by looping the spoken line 'I carry a badge' many times over), but sort of obscu­res the fact that much of the rest of the album also consists of music, and not only that, but music originally written by the band members themselves.

A thing, in itself, controversial: the album that presented Art Of Noise in their least compromi­sing, most seriously inaccessible emploi, at the same time betrayed their original purpose — to serve as spiritual guides to machine-crafted art — like no other. There's guitar solos a-plenty on the record, violins playing classical interludes, lounge jazz pieces coolly swung on electric pianos: they're almost becoming a real band. Sure it all goes away then, replaced by crowd recordings or wobbly white noise, to remind us that we are still in 1987, but then wham, you get a fresh saxo­phone solo passage or something. Want it or not, the human still shows through the machine.

Overall, it is the kind of album that really makes me wish Anne Dudley were born ten years earlier and had herself a little stand next to Yoko Ono's at the Indica Gallery, because In No Sense — in all senses — is that particular musical statement that 'Revolution No. 9' could have been, but never was. Of course, one big difference is that Art Of Noise, at their best, were inten­ded to be fun: laughing-smiling, celebrating life's absurdities or, at least, mocking them rather than being terrified at their sight. But then that's exactly what the Beatles' spirit was, too, isn't it, before life made them all bitter and grim? I don't know about everybody else, but this is just the way I like my modern art: self-ironic, easy-going, butterfly-style. You may hate this album, but you will almost certainly snicker at it at least once or twice, and that's enough by me. Thumbs up for all the good feelings.

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