Zach Condon, aka Beirut, is the pop star for the Apple Notebook generation. He writes witty songs sung in a frail, gentle voice and goes to authentic places like Mexico to record with a funeral band.
Beirut’s new album ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ shakes and shimmies like a rattlesnake charmer after a bottle of Mezcal. Zach Condon travelled out to a decidedly lo-tech part of Mexico to bring you the exotic and combine it with familiar Alternative music into a ‘what if’ joyride - Just like surfing the web on your notebook.
Beirut’s music is made by and for people who search the internet: That looks weird, I must see it; ooh, that’s funny, let’s have it. Zach takes local traditions and makes them palatable for a global audience that only needs a vague liking of alternative music to ‘get it’.
Everybody surfs like that, but there is surprisingly little music out there that’s done this way. For now, 22-year old Zach rules the roost from his Brooklyn base.
Zach’s Beirut made its name fusing Balkan gypsy music - unknown to a global audience - with Alternative Pop on ‘Gulag Orkestar’ in 2006. ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ explores a different local tradition, that of rural Mexico.
The story goes that Zach recorded ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ with a Mexican funeral band in a godforsaken place in the Oaxaca province in the south of the country, called Teotitlan del Valle.
Teotitlan is, by all accounts, one of the oldest settlements in all of Mexico, founded by the mysterious Zapotec people. The Zapotec’s got driven out long before the Spanish conquistadores raided the place, hence the album title. The Jimenez Band from Teotitlan plays its own take on European marching band music, enriched by the localities history and customs.
Whether ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ was made with a genuine, 19-piece Mexican funeral band or not, the brassy ‘Zapotec’ struts it’s curious, exotic stuff with attitude.
Of course, the whole thing could just as likely be a big send-up and the album was recorded on a notebook in Brooklyn.
In fairness, I always thought the story behind Beirut’s ‘Gulag Orkestar’ sounded a bit like a yarn. The whole ‘I was an American bum in Paris and discovered this amazing gypsy music by chance’ was too picturesque to be true.
The story behind ‘Zapotecs’ runs something like: ‘I was thinking of doing a soundtrack to a Mexican movie and a band member’s mum is a professor in Mexico and she said check these guys out’.
This guy should write film scripts.
Whatever the story, the music on the first half of the album is pretty darn cool. The marching rhythms roll and the brass jumps and veers dangerously close to anarchy, but it’s all resolved within a little three-minute drama.
The second half of the album, titled ‘Holland’ and credited to ‘Realpeople’, is made up of low key electronica. Realpeople is another pseudonym for Zach and this is the kind of music he knocks together at home when he’s fed up with listening to his Beirut work-in-progress. You get gentle pop songs with wacky titles, Zach’s crooning vocals and tinny rhythms. Fans of Hot Chip, Pet Shop Boys and Junior Boys should take notice.
‘Holland’ is pure laptop pop, not as vivid as ‘March Of The Zapotecs’, but likeable. it will grow on you.
Just to illustrate my point about Zach being the Notebook Generation pop star: ‘Zapotec’ is more popular in the US, where MP3 downloads of the album outsell CDs by far, than in Europe. The album is Top 20 in the amazon.com download charts, despite (or because of) the fact that it was leaked to file sharing sites more than a month before its release.
OK, I’m an old cynic, the leak of ‘Zapotec’ looks like solid promotion work to me. Few artists have built their career as swift and consistently through the internet as Zach. Other musicians could do worse than watch Beirut and learn.
As an album, the ‘March Of The Zapotecs/Holland’ combination is a bit messy but very likeable.
We say: 
US Readers - Buy ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ On CD Or MP3 Here!
BUY CD BUY MP3
UK And Ireland Readers - Buy ‘March Of The Zapotecs’ On CD Or MP3 Here!
BUY CD BUY MP3
Photo Credit (Thumbnail): Kristianna Smith
