Zach Condon was a teenage wunderkind when he recorded Gulag Orkestar, Beirut’s impressive 2006 debut. That album fused Balkan brass band music with a dose of early Magnetic Fields, and songs such as “Postcards From Italy” and “Brandenburg” became the first of many songs inspired by Condon’s peripatetic wanderings. No No No is the fifth Beirut album, counting the 2008 March Of The Zapotec/Holland double EP. It follows 2011’s The Rip Tide in its toning down of overt multi-culti arrangements, but it’s better: It avoids that work’s sometimes tepid moments—as it should, since it’s a nine-song, 30-minute record.
Part of the fun of No No No comes when Condon sets his emotional, reaching voice to a bouncy beat. “Perth” starts with a soul/jazz keyboard riff—electric piano or organ play prominent roles throughout the record—and then makes way for horn fanfares; it’s a spare ditty, dressed up gloriously. There’s a catchy, singsong quality to many of the tunes here: The title track’s lyrics contain only four lines (“Don’t know the first thing about who you are/My heart is waiting, taken in from the start/If we don’t go now, we won’t get very far/Don’t know the first thing about who you are”), but Condon builds the song into a grand fugue, and the lines become more unsettling as they return.
As in the past, Condon uses place-name song titles (“Gibraltar,” “Fener”) and glimpses of Balkan brass and French chanson, but No No No plays less like a travelogue than simply what it is: a really good—if brief—Beirut album.
—Steve Klinge
