Beirut!

Beirut w/ A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Southgate House
Newport, KY: October 10, 2006

It was with no small amount of consternation that I decided to see the blogpopular band Beirut perform.  It was a Tuesday night, and I am old.  I had work to look forward to in the morning and I had already had too much to drink before the doors were even scheduled to open.  Needless to say, it takes a lot to get an old curmudgeon like me out the door.  But, I told myself, it’s not every night that you get the opportunity to see Eastern European folk music reinterpreted by children with roots in the western United States. So I went.

Immediately, I regretted my decision.  It was like I had walked into the aftermath of a zombie movie: bodies were slumped over tables, the bartender’s eyes were rolled in the back of his head, and there was this awful droning noise bleeding out of the speakers.  A waifish, bearded man was artlessly clanging on the E-string of his guitar and I assumed (hoped) that he was tuning.  He wasn’t.  He was looping.  After each clang he would reach over and twist a knob or push a button so that the clangs could continue without his assistance and he could add more guitar effects on top, some of which was more palatable. His stage name was Animal Hospital, but he was actually the sound guy for the following two acts: A Hawk and a Hacksaw and the aforementioned Beirut.  This may explain his addition to the bill.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw, which the more acute readers out there will note as a slightly misguided attempt at a Hamlet reference, consisted of a man and a woman.  The woman, who was referred to as Heather Trost, played violin.  The man, whom research proved to be Jeremy Barnes of Neutral Milk Hotel, played accordion, a motley set-up of kickable drums (including a drum stick on the knee at cowbell level), and a hat composed of jingle bells, which had another drum stick sticking out to hit a cymbal positioned behind his skull.  Visually, this arrangement was quite impressive.  Technically…well, nobody holds Allen Iverson’s scrappiness against him when he pulls out the miracles he’s known for.

Buried somewhere beneath a full-body armor of instruments, Barnes would grunt a few syllables into the microphone stationed near his mustache and kickstart into a frenzied polyphony of Balkan rhythms.  Tapans and tambourines thumped unexpectedly, Barnes’s head jangled with no apparent sense of meter, and his fingers wound up and down the accordion in minor keys.  Occasionally, he would bark at the Animal Hospital sound guy with imperatives like, “Kevin, I can’t hear the violin!” or, “Kevin, I need more accordion!  More accordion!”  Not being an expert on traditional Eastern European folk music, I can’t say for sure that what they were playing were songs so much as rowdy rhythms played out for a set number of measures before coming to an abrupt stop.  Regardless, the the pair of musicians responsible for this racket had me utterly entranced.  At the end of their set, when Heather and Jeremy walked into the crowd to play, I entertained the notion that this must be how courting rituals are played out by Bulgarian teenagers.  The woman plays a flirty violin scale as if to say, “You don’t lose your temper when you drink vodka, I find that attractive,” to which the man responds by blurting out a raunchy accordion riff that suggests, “You have nice child bearing hips, let’s get together.”  Yes, it’s possible I was consuming alcohol at the time – what of it?

Keep in mind that I am old enough to legally purchase alcohol.  I’m not so sure the same can be said for the boys and girl of Beirut, who would later embarassingly announce that this show was the most sober they’ve performed all tour.  Perhaps this can be excused as 20-year-old singer Zach Condon is capable of confidently imitating the constricted throat warblings of a man three times his age and composing arrangements with a patient maturity.  Condon’s appropriation of Balkan gypsy music hasn’t raised as much ire as Paul Simon’s collaborations with Ladysmith Black Mambazo; instead, the rich, melancholy melodies of Beirut’s debut album Gulag Orkestar has been greeted with open arms by the citizen critics of cyberspace.  While the album has a subdued, distant feel to it, on stage Beirut’s sound is robust and intimate.  Plus, there’s something distinctly charming about seeing three men standing side-by-side, playing meaningfully on ukuleles.  Of course, there was more than just ukuleles, there were mandolins, violins, cellos, saxophones, trumpets, organs, accordions, and a drummer who appeared to have a nasty cut on his forehead.  There was also one overeager kid in an ironic Harley Davidson T-shirt who played one, occasionally two, tambourines with as much gusto as he could muster to compensate for the fact that he was relegated to tambourine duty. 

Of course, with so many instruments shuffling about on stage, there was a healthy amount of downtime between each song, but Condon’s orkestar helped turn his bedroom visions into theatrical monsters: “Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)” became a drunken barroom singalong, “Scenic World” became a twee organ-grinding dance number, “Gulag Orkestar” let loose a Slavic barrage of noise.  Ignore for a moment the fact that Condon’s from Albuquerque.  The band made their way through a number of newer songs, that sounded to be in much the same style as the album songs.  Beirut even knocked out a joyous cover of the old Ary Barroso tune “Brazil,” which would have been even more enjoyable if it weren’t for that overcompensating jackass in the Harley tee making such a spectacle of the hand drum he was pounding. 

Still, old man gripes over youthful showboating aside, the concert was brazenly fun.  Old, dusty postcards were rediscovered as fresh memories of overseas vacations; forgotten tales of Soviet bloc struggles were reimagined as the cherished foundations of family trees.  Beirut and A Hawk and a Hacksaw were out to reclaim Tuesday night in the name of precocious youth and post-Cold War assimilation, in effect reminding me what it was like to drink and dream when I was four years younger.

Beirut – Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)
(available on Gulag Orkestar)

Beirut homepage

-Posted by Todd