League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on February 24, 2009

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

This time the video is set in the courtyard of a Brooklyn apartment building. I like the substitution of twin ukuleles in this live arrangement for the oom-pah synthesizers on the album version, a simpler and more appropriately intimate take on the song.

In contrast to the constant motion of the descending-stairwell setting of the video for “Nantes,” here the musicians are static and placed haphazardly about the courtyard, like statuary in a cloister.

In the previous post I proposed a theory that these videos portray “the band inside Zach’s head.” I think the musicians aren’t really “there,” but are like spirits that come to life as Zach brings his fantasized Euro-angst into his adopted Brooklyn home. That interpretation works all the more in this second video, as the band members stay stiff and stationary while Zach dances and staggers about.

This song is a lover’s lament over what was and might have been…

A Sunday smile you wore it for a while.
A Sunday mile we paused and sang.
A Sunday smile you wore it for a while.
A Sunday mile we paused and sang.
A Sunday smile and we felt true.

…and Condon delivers it like words muttered through beer and smoke in a dusky tavern. The sense of inebriation is accented not only by Zach’s dizzy dancing, but by the dancing of the camera itself, which staggers up to and around the stationary musicians, now zooming too close to a face, now suddenly pointing at the sky, now focusing on a random detail, then circling around and around Zach. “Raise your pints with me, my boys. If we can’t see tomorrow, at least we can see the bottoms of our glasses.”

We burnt to the ground
left a view to admire
with buildings inside church of white.
We burnt to the ground left a grave to admire.
And as we reach for the sky, reach the church of white.

I love this album, but I love it in this video form even better. Too often in music videos, the cleverness of the video producer gets in the way of the song. The approach taken here actually makes the songs better, gives them a more powerful emotional life than they already have on the album.

Purchase

The Flying Club Cup (CD)
The Flying Club Cup (download)