Album Review: Beirut, A Study Of Losses

A Study Of Losses is far from a conventional record. The album was commissioned by a Swedish circus to soundtrack an acrobatic stage show, inspired by a German novel about a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations.

But then, Beirut’s Zach Condon is a far-from-conventional musician. This listener remembers walking up a windy lane in Istanbul’s Kadiköy district in 2012, hearing the strains of Gulag Orkestar emanating from a basement window and subsequently finding the coolest bar on the Asian side of that metropolis: Beirut, bringing like-minded people together since 2006.

These 18 new tracks include 11 songs and seven instrumentals. Each of the latter is named for one of the lunar seas, and they range from the stately and beautiful ‘Oceanus Procellarum’ to the ululating strings of ‘Mae Imbrium’ and the simply stunning ‘Mare Serenitatis’.

On the tracks with lyrics, there’s a distinct lightness of touch, even though the emotions may weigh heavily. So ‘Forest Encyclopedia’ drips melancholy from every chord, while the gorgeous and bittersweet ‘Villa Sacchetti’ and the lilt of ‘Tuanaki Atoll’ will lighten even the most entrenched frown.

Elsewhere, there’s the funereal dirge of ‘Sappho’s Poems’; the accordion-driven sway of ‘The Moonwalker’; the piano-led, hymnal ‘Caspian Tiger’; and the hypnotic ‘Mare Nectaris’, all howling synths and glitches, over which Condon waxes mantra-like.

The synth-based ‘Ghost Train’ and ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’, while impressive, sit a little uneasily alongside the album’s more acoustic core. But overall, A Study Of Losses is wilfully and wonderfully odd.

8/10

Out now