The REVIEWS
Beirut
Gallipoli
(4AD)
The test of a good Beirut song: Does it move you to tears and inexplicably so? “Gallipoli,” the first single from Zach Condon’s latest, passes the litmus in its first three bars. Like “Elephant Gun” and “The Rip Tide,” standouts from Beirut’s patina-stained oeuvre that can involuntarily overcome the most stoic with brass and a mournful cadence, his first words here: “We tell tales to be known,” ring like a credo. It quickly reveals an album with fully formed ideas of mortality, memory, and misgivings drawn from a palpable emotional core, largely absent from amenable last LP, 2015’s No No No.
Opener “When I Die” achieves the same effect. It grapples with death and impermanence as the ebb and swell of horns clutch at our hearts. Without devolving into pathos, Condon assures: “Don’t cry/I promise that I’ll get it right/I’ve been practicing my whole life.”
The ukulele-led “Varieties of Exile” then pares it all back. Bearing the recurring motif of things coming to an end, it employs the plaintive mode of “The Rip Tide” with sparse electronic flourishes. The piano leitmotif of “I Giardini” echoes “C’est Le Vent, Betty” from the French film Betty Blue. It aligns the film’s theme—an intense love affair’s untimely end—to perhaps Condon’s own affairs of the heart. “Landslide” gives us another piece to the puzzle of his self-exile in Berlin.
The appeal of making music like a vagabond traversing continents, once on the wane, now appears back. From Gallipoli’s nascence in Upstate New York in 2016, when Condon’s old Farfisa organ (acquired from the art house cinema he worked at as a teenager and featured heavily on 2006’s Gulag Okestar) was shipped from his parent’s Santa Fe home, to demos fleshed out with band mates, in a Puglia studio, in Southern Italy. Lyrics were written in solitude upon his return to Berlin, where he now resides.
Gallipoli is swooningly gorgeous and rich with offerings we’ve come to love about Condon: His weakness for exotic cities as song titles, a romance with cultures of antiquity, the combination of organ and brass fanfare, an exceptional sense for melody, and an ever-full heart. Three well-placed instrumentals punctuate and act as palate cleansers. Nowhere is this sugary, overly ornate, or maudlin: An excellent return to form. (www.beirutband.com)
By Celine Teo-Blockey
Better Oblivion Community Center
Better Oblivion Community Center
(DEAD OCEANS)
Coming off the back of one of the best albums of 2017 (Stranger in the Alps) and her lauded side-band boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers launches wholeheartedly into another meeting of the minds here with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst as Better Oblivion Community Center. Of course, he’s hit a career resurgence recently too, with the double-header of Ruminations and its companion piece Salutations.
Here, though, we have a record that certainly bears the stamp of both its co-creators but at the same time offers, surprisingly, a little more than the sum of its parts.
Firstly, Bridgers and Oberst wisely eschew the duet clichés, and do so deftly. There’s no call-and-response, tit-for-tat role-play here, just a set of remarkably strong songs from a pair of artists who seem to not only struggle with the same fears and traumas but also share the same glimpses of hope.
Bridgers tempers Oberst’s usual verbosity, leading him into simpler, clearer structures as on the pounding, hefty surge of “Dylan Thomas” (“I’ll die like Dylan Thomas/A seizure on the bar room floor”), their voices melding magically in melancholia.
Oberst, conversely, pushes Bridgers in some fresh musical directions—the Digital Ash in the Digital Urn-era electro sounds of “Exception to the Rule” or the full-on, grungy, rock n’ romance of rough hewn highlight “Big Black Heart.”
Oberst’s wavering croak and Bridgers’ chiming bell vocal perhaps shouldn’t work on paper—yet here, on songs like “Service Road,” which would feel like a Ruminations outtake were it not for Bridgers supernatural backing vocals, they could not be more suited.
The oft-worn themes of addiction, loss, and doomed romance are as prevalent as one would expect—“Dominos” for instance, with its lyric “It gets dark in the morning/Trade sleep for drinks in a bar” teeters on the verge of self parody; that is until Bridgers as Emmy Lou swoops in to save the day.
There’s fun to be had here, by the way. The simply arranged, Replacements and Guns N’ Roses referencing “Chesapeake” is a perfect, bright ballad with a classic Oberst couplet to boot—“My hero plays to no-one in a parking lot/ Even though there’s no-one around you broke a leg and the house came down.” “My City” is a straightforward lil’ country jaunt that, while disposable, is eminently enjoyable too.
From the opener “Didn’t Know What I Was In For” with its refrain of “I’ve never done anything for anyone” to the closing line of “Dominoes” and it’s stoic, smiling kiss-off—“If you’re not feeling ready/There’s always tomorrow”—this is a cohesive, creative, and multi-faceted record that will over-joy fans of both artists while offering the spark of magic that so rarely comes with these kinds of collaborations.(www.betteroblivioncommunitycenter.org)
By Michael James Hall
James Blake
Assume Form
(REPUBLIC)
On Assume Form, James Blake’s long-awaited fourth album, the London-born singer/producer displays just how much he has changed, some would say progressed, since the dark majesty of his self-titled debut back in 2011. Through myriad collaborations with Bon Iver, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar, as well a series of increasingly maudlin solo offerings, Blake has firmed up a place as an artist always on the precipice of the big time—talented enough to rub mixes with the big players yet perhaps weighted by the often hauntingly cast bedroom sadness of his own output.
As an electronic producer and songwriter Blake shows some prowess here; the melodically complex, particularly delicate, and brilliantly humane (“She watched me lose face every day/Rather than lose me” intones Blake’s
