I’m blogging through the series of videos made to accompany the album Flying Club Cup by Beirut (aka Zach Condon and band). Song #5 is Cliquot.

 
I think this may be my favorite song on the album. There is both resignation and hope. We lose people we deeply love, but life continues.

A plague in the [...]

Here is the video from the fourth song on Flying Club Cup by Beirut (Zach Condon and band). The song is “La Banlieue”

 
La banlieue (literally “the outskirts”) is the French term for an area of low income housing around the edge of a city. It’s the hood.
The song is one of two instrumentals on the [...]

…and how excited are people about this book?
My friend, WTS student Art Boulet, actually stood outside the doors of Westminster Bookstore in freezing rain to be the first customer to get a copy. After making sure he understood that this was not an eighth Harry Potter book, we gladly sold Art four copies. He says [...]

I’m currently blogging day by day through the set of videos for Zach Condon’s (aka Beirut) magical album The Flying Club Cup. Today’s song is “Guyamas Sonora.”

I think it was this song that made me start thinking about another side to Zach’s exploration of French chanson on this album. While much of the album is [...]

Here is the video for “Sunday Smile,” the second song off Beirut’s new album Flying Club Cup.

This one is set in the courtyard of a Brooklyn apartment building. The first thing I like in this live arrangement is the subbing of twin ukuleles for the oom-pah synthesizers on the album version, a simpler and appropriately [...]

Beirut (Creator/songwriter Zach Condon & band) is a marvelous fusion of indie/pop sensibilities with European folk traditions. Condon’s first album, 2006’s Gulag Orkestar, was heavily influence by Balkan and gypsy traditions. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Eastern European folk music even since I spent a summer in Hungary. Condon and [...]