I more or less owe this one to Kelly - she pointed it out when it was playing at Ici a while back (at which time I thought that Beirut sounded a lot better than I'd imagined), and then set me up with a copy further down the line. And hey, it's really, really good.
I can take the back story or leave it - by which I mean that I don't really care about the process by which the guy behind Beirut arrived at this sound, or how young he is, or even (gasp) the broader implications of his appropriations. What I am interested by is how good the music on Gulag Orkestar is, reeling back and forth, rising and falling in waves of accordion, horns and some of the most lachrimose singing this side of Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman ("Scenic World", incidentally, could totally have been done by either of the above). My favourites are the sun and shadows prettiness of "Postcards From Italy" and the merry-go-round lament "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)", but it's the way the album holds together as a whole, cacophonously in places but always with an overriding sense of direction and vision, which makes it. I'm not in ecstasies over this album, but I like it a lot.
