Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 20/11/06
Label: 4AD

So where do you go when the alternative becomes the mainstream? When Sigur Ros are soundtracking David Attenborough's "Planet Earth", The Pipettes help to usher Dusty Springfield into the UK Hall Of Fame, and the likes of The Long Blondes and The Gossip are such accepted signifiers of cool that they crop up everywhere from the broadsheets to the BBC. Either you head deep into the underground, for the scenes that deliberately shy away from the limelight, or you follow the lead of Joanna Newsom and Beirut - and go back in time.

While Newsom looked to medieval madrigals for inspiration on her latest album, "Ys", 20-year-old American Zach Condon, aka Beirut, has journeyed to 18th and 19th century Romania for his debut outing. Inspired by Emir Kusturica's superb "Black Cat, White Cat" movie, a macabre comedy centred around a wedding on the banks of the river Danube, and a Serbian musician he met in Paris while travelling around Europe, Condon's created an emotive, atmospheric dreamworld that sounds like an echo from history.

Much of "Gulag Orkestar" could be set at the Roma wedding in "Black Cat, White Cat" - a wedding, incidentally, where the groom's recently deceased grandfather has been stashed in the attic. There's a creaking, romantic feeling to the music, part the deadened shuffle of a funeral march, part the blurred slump of the end of a very, very long celebration. Accordions wheeze, ukuleles raise glasses for a sudden toast, trumpets spiral upwards with inebriated joy, the percussion thwacks a solitary, shattered beat. The mood is triumphant yet drained.

Far and away the highlight of the album is "Postcards From Italy", which also offers the most contemporary reference points. Over a backing that blends the Balkan folk of his influences with hints of the Magnetic Fields and (recent tour mates) Calexico, Condon wails and sighs like Thom Yorke finally shown how to escape the modern world once and for all. In fact, you can't help wonder if Thom Yorke's "The Eraser" shouldn't have sounded like this - not an electronic peek into the beyond, but a canny step sideways, a true disappearing act.

The rest of the album isn't quite as song-driven as "Postcards From Italy", preferring instead to conjure up the mood and scenario outlined above with instrumental or semi-instrumental rambles that sound a hair's breadth away from being inspired stretches of improvisation. But while "The Bunker" or "Brandeburg" don't quite have the startling focus of "Postcards…", they gather a rich, enveloping atmosphere around them that's quickly intoxicating. Not bad for a record that was written while its creative core was still in his teens. Charge your glasses please - a bold new talent has just wandered into view.

    by Ian Watson