NEW ALBUMS
BEIRUT
A Study Of Losses POMPEII
Curiosities and captivating melodies on Zach Condon’s seventh.
By Sharon O’Connell
LINA GAIßER
8/10
Zach Condon: his most ambitious work yet
ALIAS aside, Zach Condon could hardly have signalled his internationalism more clearly had he declared himself a member state of the UN. From his precocious debut as a Santa Fe teen with 2006’s Gulag Orkestar, which folded raggedy Balkan folk into indie pop and featured song titles like “Brandenburg” and “Bratislava”, to 2023’s Hadsel, for which he relocated to a remote Norwegian island during the winter dark, escapism has always loomed large.
It’s a trait differently channelled on Beirut’s latest album. Commissioned by the Swedish contemporary circus Kompani Giraff, A Study Of Losses is the musical accompaniment to their latest project, based on an adaptation of German author Judith Schalansky’s novel An Inventory Of Losses. As the title suggests, its theme – and that of the circus show – is permanent disappearance, whether of an animal (the Caspian tiger), ancient scriptures (the seven treatises of Manichaeism) or a South Pacific atoll (the phantasmal Tuanaki). Pathos is necessarily in play but so too are exoticism, romance and arcane history – it’s easy to see why Condon found the project so appealing. As he told Uncut: “I deeply wish we had a longer sense of the legacies and culture we leave behind. There is something meaningful and important here and yet you can’t save everything or there’s never any room for something new. It can be frustrating and circular to ponder these things and in the end there’s too much mystery. Perhaps that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.”