If you climb into the attic and rummage through old suitcases, you will at best come across forgotten treasures, but a yellowed photo album is not bad either. You can imagine ARTIFACTS as a trip to the attic. Beirut mastermind Zach Condon found a lot of stuff up there, not entirely forgotten clothes, but also faded children’s pictures.
The B-sides are nice but already well-known, as is the EP “Lon Gisland” or the Caetano Veloso cover “O Leãozinho”. Things get exciting with the unreleased recordings, most of which date from the time before Condon embarked on the journey through Europe that was to have such a lasting effect on his sound. The liner notes describe how young Zach dropped out of school and sat in his bedroom, plagued by “frustration and angst about the future.”
Sometimes a jewel is found in the attic
And in songs like “Sicily” you don’t just hear awkward electronic beats, but that dark spirit of the high school dropout that breaks the ground in extravagant melodies and longing trumpet lines on which the success of Beirut is based. So Condon didn’t just pick up on the epic melancholy in Eastern Europe, that’s one realization of ARTIFACTS.
The other: Sometimes a jewel can be found in the attic. Condon says he worked obsessively on Now I’m Gone, only to get frustrated and put the song down and never listen to it again because he didn’t want to get close to what was on his mind. Given the size of this marvel, one would love to hear the original inside Zach Condon’s head.
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