the flying club cup by beirut

Highlighting a different album every weekend isn't very easy to do - I come across several problems. For instance, I would love to highlight the new Evangelicals release that came out Tuesday, but I just haven't heard it yet. And I don't spend all my time listening to brand new music, anyway - I love to pull out an old album that I haven't listened to in a while, or ones that I've had but I'm not well acquainted with yet.

So, with that disclaimer, I want to showcase my 7th favorite record of 2007, and Beirut's latest, The Flying Club Cup, released by Brooklyn label Ba Da Bing! on Oct. 9, 2007. Beirut is 22-year-old Zach Condon, a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who dropped out of high school at 16 to travel Europe. There he encountered the Balkan Gypsy music that he has blended with folk to create the sounds heard on his first record, Gulag Orkestar.

The Flying Club Cup still has those sounds intact, but shows a great influence from French music as well. Condon lives in Brooklyn, but spent much of the past year living in Paris. On the sound of The Flying Club Cup, Condon says, "I was listening to a lot of Jacques Brel and French chanson music--pop songs shrouded in big, glorious, over-the-top arrangements and all this drama--and that was in some sense unfamiliar territory to me. So I started buying new instruments and relying on things I wasn't necessarily comfortable with, like French horns and euphoniums, carrying these big, epic big brass parts that I used to do all on trumpets, and working with accordion and organ instead of all ukulele--very much throwing myself in the world of classical pop music, I guess you could say."

All that to say, it is a magnificent record.

Here is a video MTV produced about Beirut and his experience with La Blogothèque, a French web site well-known for their Concerts à emporter (take away shows). The take away shows are very raw live footage shot by Vincent Moon (Mathieu Saura) often in the streets of France.




Condon and Moon worked together to shoot The Flying Club Cup in its entirety in the streets of Brooklyn. To watch them, click here.

To listen to tracks by The Real People (Condon's moniker in high school, before becoming Beirut) -- click here.