In recent interviews, Beirut singer and songwriter Zach Condon has shed some light on the backstory behind the odd, skeletal sound of his band's new album. Condon had been embroiled in personal and creative despair for a few years, some of it the result of working on a new maximalist opus in the vein of his previous work. He abandoned this material to return to low-stakes jamming in a piano trio format; ultimately, No No No's songs developed out of this approach, and the album was recorded in just a couple of weeks. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention.
It would be easy to assume that reinvention was foremost on Condon's mind. After all, his ethnomusicological interests and motley folk orchestras have next to nothing to do with today's musical landscape. Nine years ago, however, these elements seemed to fit in perfectly, distinguishing Condon from the expanding crooner rank-and-file (Jens Lekman, Andrew Bird, Patrick Wolf, Rufus Wainwright) and aligning him with a broader drift toward prewar—or, to use a once-popular keyword, "sepia tone"—nostalgia (see also: the shanties and strophic ballads of the Decemberists, the carny/gypsy fusions of Man Man and Gogol Bordello). But it was doubtless Condon's sense of how to make his compositions sound ornate and simple at the same time—through triumphant, sometimes wordless choruses—that truly gained him his fanbase. His 2006 and 2007 releases were full of mild-mannered anthems that stood on their own—mix-CD-ready cuts like "Postcards from Italy", "Elephant Gun", and "Nantes".
Unlike this formative work, there's a sense of absence in the music of No No No; sometimes Condon's commitment to simplicity leads to undeveloped ideas. Condon has honed his innate skill as an arranger of chamber horn and string ensembles over the years: The first half of his 2009 double EP, March of the Zapotec, scored largely for 19-piece Mexican brass band, took his skill to its furthest level of complexity, while the follow up, The Rip Tide, found him making a more serious bid for pop/rock crossover success. For Condon to put his big-bandleader chops to the side—so crucial to all of his previous work—on his first album in four years seems like a tacit acknowledgment that the style of his earlier music is no longer in vogue, as well as a need to find a new, less obsessive process.
When Condon does employ horns on the new album, they are effective precisely because they are so sparing: The writing has a punchier, more functional quality that is worlds away from his former brass chorale leviathans. There are no vestiges of the approach that sometimes made it feel as if Condon had built his entire career in the shadow of Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Fool". These are horn licks in the tradition of '60s and '70s R&B, and all of the later pop music that bent it out of shape.
But though this is all new for Beirut, the charm of the well-chiseled, simplistic grooves is modest, and Condon's strong melodic voice is not always there to create a through line. It floats on top of everything like a decorative descant, which can sometimes be taken or left. The two-minute "At Once" pairs an irresolute, maddeningly cyclical four-chord piano progression with a melody that is mostly just one note, and vocals are eschewed entirely on "As Needed" (which sounds like we are hearing only the backing track for a "Surfs Up"-like Smile outtake). It's sometimes easy to wonder what, exactly, Condon was going for when committing so fiercely to such lightly sketched ideas.
The answer would seem to be mood, or simply his own pleasure; Condon's own comments articulated how fun the process of making the album was. The greatest joy, however, seems to have occurred when these ideas were germinating, not being formalized and committed to wax. On midtempo flotsam like "Pacheco", or even the slightly awkward title track, the passion seems to have already been wrung out of the song. The best tracks are the most uptempo and groove-locked: moments where Condon's initial excitement seems to have seeped into his melodies. The clearest examples are "Gibraltar" and "Perth", with their syncopated guitar rhythms.
No No No may sound ineffectual after a cursory listen, but it reveals some subtle pleasures if you keep it in rotation. Even potentially soporific moments like closer "So Allowed", with its borderline West Side Story-quoting chorus, are ultimately pleasant, and even poignant. But it lacks the melodic heft out of which Beirut briefly built an empire, and doesn't demonstrate Condon searching for something else to fill that void. While it definitely unifies itself around and gains some affective power from sounding unfinished, it still sounds it.
