For a band that crafts songs that could’ve been written in Polish ghettos or performed by Balkan street buskers, that regularly name-drops European locales and is named for a city that’s known as “the Paris of the Middle East,” it’s easy to overlook the fact that Beirut is an all-American band with a faux-European slant, fronted by a boy from Santa Fe.
The perpetually sleepy-eyed Zach Condon (et al) played a show in McDonald Theatre on Sunday night. With six members and a double-digit number of instruments among them, Beirut’s set was distinctively flawless.
Opening with “Scenic World,” Condon took the center microphone, armed with a flugelhorn, and sang, “The lights go on / the lights go off” as a spotlight illuminated him. The set was explosive from the start, followed by “Elephant Gun” and “East Harlem.”
At times the front three members, Condon (on flugelhorn), Ben Lanz (trombone), and Kyle Resnick (trumpet) played as microphones peered into their horns’ funnels. Blue lights lit them from below and they were juxtaposed against a stark blood-red backdrop; for a moment, it was as though this weren’t a scene in downtown Eugene, but rather an intimate Parisian jazz club.
While the band meanders through made-up genres that could soundtrack a Sicilian funeral or a Balkan wedding, it’s not easy to identify their songs by name all the time, but this much is for sure: they played the Spanish mariachi songs that sound like you’re staring down a firing squad; they’ve mastered the tender, shaken horns of “The Shrew” that transported the audience to a somber cantina, and the jive, conga-line hits like “No No No” and “Gibraltar” from the band’s newest album, No No No.
The band’s renditions of “My Night with a Prostitute from Marseille,” “East Harlem,” “Nantes,” and “In The Mausoleum” were nothing short of perfect.
Altogether, Beirut has put out 9 EPs and albums, six of which are very good and three of which are brilliant. Its first album, 2006’s Gulag Orkestar, gets its title from a mash-up of “gulag” – the Soviet government agency that supported forced labor camps and “orkestar” – the Serbo-Croatian word for “orchestra.” A rough depravity combined with the symphonic elegance just about sums up the brassy ensemble.
They relied heavily on the horns, strings, and keys for a while, and didn’t start seriously employing a computer as an instrument until 2009 on the masterful double-EP March of the Zapotec/Holland. Since then, Beirut has regularly had a synth matching the brass note for note.
Following the art-pop allure of baroque opener Julia Holter, Beirut took the stage sometime around 9 p.m. and exited no later than 10:30. The band didn’t overstay their welcome, and really executed just the right set length, which is an under-appreciated element to any good Sunday night show. By the end, saliva dribbled from the brass horns, and it was time to go home, wherever that may be.
Review: Beirut played a distinctively perfect set at the McDonald
Emerson Malone
October 11, 2015
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