Next Steps New EPs from TMS and Beirut
Zachary Francis of Beirut
Throw Me the Statue, Purpleface (Secretly Canadian)
Beirut, March of the Zapotec / Holland (Ba Da Bing!)
The careers of Throw Me the Statue and Beirut are still young, and for the moment it seems both bands are doing exactly what they should. The stories of their success almost make this music business stuff sound easy: TMTS frontman Scott Reitherman created the debut LP Moonbeams largely on his own, released it on his own Baskerville Hill label in 2007 (to luxuriant blog press), and was picked up by Secretly Canadian, who re-released the album in 2008. Beirut mastermind Zach Condon, having fallen in love with Balkan folk and French pop in his teens, self-recorded an album steeped in the former (2006’s Gulag Orkestar) that got him signed to Ba Da Bing!, and followed it up with an effort heavily influenced by the latter (2007’s The Flying Club Cup)–all of this by the age of twenty-one.
After a one-man bedroom band explodes into relevance, the usual Step Two is to get a proper backing band together and tour like hell, which both artists have done impressively–Reitherman filling out his onstage sound with a tight four-piece, and Condon surrounding himself with a veritable army of brass and strings. It’s when it comes time to record again that question marks begin to pop up. Do you incorporate the backing band, or stick to your old format? What effect does the experience of performing for an audience, instead of just your four-track or computer, have on your arrangements? Does being a professional musician, instead of just a kid with a dream, change the way you write songs? The buzz machine is buzzing, expectations are high, and sometimes the best way to make everyone shut up for a minute is to release an EP. Not a huge commitment, not a definitive statement on the band’s direction, just a little something to whet the public’s collective appetite. That’s the route these two intriguing acts have decided to take; this past month saw the release of Throw Me the Statue’s Purpleface and Beirut’s March of the Zapotec / Holland.
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Purpleface begins with a disorienting jumble of sounds that, ever so slowly, converges into something resembling a coherent whole. A Casio-type beat, typical of TMTS’s repertoire, takes center stage for a precious few seconds before giving way to the heavy pounding of live drums, signaling a patent break from form (the way Elliott Smith did when the drums kicked in on “King’s Crossing”). An acoustic piano, another anomaly in the band’s formerly synth-centric world, adds some moody, resonant tones to the mix, its sustain pedal evidently floored. The heir apparent to Moonbeams opener “Young Sensualists” is “That’s How You Win,” a far more complex and cryptic beast. Where its predecessor related frankly the story of a friendship ruined by selfishness and lust, there’s no clear narrative in the lyrics of “That’s How You Win”; all that comes through in its string of free-associative phrases is a sense of world-weary chagrin, couched in ironic affirmation: “Unblinking eyes make for tired days,” goes the refrain, “But don’t let it get you down.”
A melancholic tone now set, Purpleface proceeds with a reworking of Moonbeams track “Written in Heart Signs, Faintly” that suggests Reitherman spent a lot of the time between releases listening to Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky. The album version was a rare moment of acoustic sparseness–just Reitherman and his guitar, accompanied by tambourine and the faint plinking of bells. The EP version does away with the campfire instrumentation and gives the song the post-rock treatment, adorning it with blippy guitars, warm waves of malleted cymbals, and thick clouds of reverb fog. The flood of new and diverse sounds gives the song a dynamic malleability it couldn’t have in its previous incarnation, conjuring drama and passion in what once seemed little more than an idle daydream. We are tossed headlong into the fantasy landscape the lyrics describe, the place in the clouds “where the kissing never, ever stops.”
Reitherman’s lyrics deal prominently in wanton sexuality, and even more prominently in the shame that such abandon often brings about. His lotus-eating protagonists generally know they’ve crossed the line, and yet never seem all that sorry for their misdeeds (see the bridge of “Heart Signs”: “Another girl’s eyes got wet / I was a total fool / But what can I do?”). It’s nice, then, to see him take a break and indulge in some genuine sentimentality, as he does on “Honeybee.” The narrator still has one foot in slumberland, and through soft blankets of woodwinds and heartbeat-like tom-tom thumps, he speaks to his lover in sleepy half-phrases of the dream from which he has just emerged. With some snappier, less shoegazey production, this could easily be an early-period Belle and Sebastian song, and Reitherman’s delivery matches the mood, trading his usual deadpan for a gentle coo. His mumbled sentence fragments don’t make much sense, but they are sung so sweetly that it hardly matters.
“Ship” rounds out the disc. It begins with a march beat, then adds instruments and vocals one by one, ramping up tension on the verse, exploding into a Sunny Day Real Estate-style jam on the chorus, then gradually falling into tight, regimented order again. This is the closest thing we’ve heard so far to the Throw Me the Statue we know and love; the vocals are clear and present, the drums no longer sound like they’re underwater, and the structure is alternately catchy and chaotic. It’s a good sign that while TMTS is clearly evolving, they haven’t abandoned the sound their fans first fell in love with. Purpleface doesn’t have a “Lolita” or an “About to Walk” or anything else on par with the ecstatic power-pop that made Moonbeams stand out from the pack, but it is certainly not without its compelling moments. This EP may only be a detour on the path to the band’s sure-to-be-buzzworthy sophomore LP, but it is a thoroughly memorable detour at that.
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Beirut’s case is a bit different. Their latest release is eleven songs long, more than enough for a full-length album, but it is divided in purpose. March of the Zapotec / Holland is actually a pair of EPs, one of them inspired by (and partially recorded on) a Mexican soujourn in the spring of 2008, and the other one a throwback to Zach Condon’s pre-Beirut days, as the electronic solo act Realpeople.
Zapotec had its genesis in the town of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, where Condon discovered his newest world-music crush: the Mexican funeral march. Aiding him is Band Jimenez, a nineteen-member brass ensemble whose performances were captured on field recordings in Teotitlan and are woven through the fabric of Condon’s usual multitrack alchemy with some cunning studio cut-and-paste. It’s a rather engaging bit of mythology, but sadly it doesn’t translate to an engaging album. The songs on Zapotec blend together for the most part; the mind wanders, forgetting for minutes at a time that it’s listening to Beirut and not just a rummage-sale mariachi record. The success of Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup was based in Condon’s ability to wed his international influences with the Western ones he grew up with; it’s that instinct that created “Postcards from Italy,” a sublime bit of genre-mashing that ought to be as appreciable to the old folkies of Eastern Europe as it is to the Williamsburg / Park Slope set. But on Zapotec, Condon’s presence within the music feels almost incidental. His vocal contributions lack their usual passion and come off as an afterthought; the arrangements, though sonically as grand as ever, feel strangely arbitrary.
Holland suffers from a distinct but related dilemma. On it, Condon-as-Realpeople shies away from Beirut’s old-world grandeur and turns to techno, perhaps the only kind of music that’s meant to sound like it was made in a bedroom. The plan, however, works a little too well; there’s nothing technically wrong with the arpeggiated synths and ditty-bop beats on these five songs, but there’s nothing terribly interesting about them either. Really, the most surprising thing about the Realpeople recordings is how spare they are–for all the trumpet calls, conga rhythms, accordion strains, and clarinet flourishes that assault the senses in Condon’s other material, the soundscapes on Holland are unadorned and conspicuously tame. And that’s a shame, because the core material here sounds far more earnest and ardent than that on Zapotec, and the Postal Service-grade accompaniment is far too often a distraction. Opener “My Night with the Prostitute from Marseille” has a particularly affecting melody, and makes one wish Condon would turn off the drum machine, pick up a guitar, and just belt it.
March of the Zapotec and Holland are a fitting pair, but more for their complementary flaws than for any kind of thematic connection: the first is all style and no substance, the second all substance and no style. Here’s hoping that on his next outing, Condon finds a middle ground, a way to stay true to the best of his creative instincts while continuing, as he has on past releases, to transcend indie-rock insularity and help make the cultural landscape in his own backyard more interesting and exciting.
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