Beirut: "My Night With The Prostitute From Marseilles"

Contrary to what you might believe after listening to a Beirut album, you’re more likely to get mugged outside of a McDonalds in Nantes than be told to quiet down by busking gypsies. But Zach Condon’s Paul Simon-y country hopping works because he sounds like that guy on a semester abroad who barely shows up to class and mostly drinks absinthe with the toothless guys at the betting parlor, staying up until the morning talking about World War II. He’s not dabbling because of any soberly aesthetic reasons, but because he really believes that he’s Jacques fucking Brel and that if he drinks enough Cotes du Rhone he can tune out our grotesque world of Twitter and “Prom Queen.”

Weirdly, though, the electronic ephemera that has always been on the sidelines of a given Beirut album now seems to be overtaking his increasingly listless horn charts. It’s like he got kicked out of the brass-band club, woke up in the gutter, heard the distant bleating of a Berlin rave, and then started mumbling over it. Still, even when biting cobblestone, he doesn’t do so bad a job. “My Night With The Prostitute from Marseilles,” the leadoff track from the electronic side of March Of The Zapotec/Realpeople Holland, is all precise, simple synth arpeggios reminding us of a slightly more expensive “Scenic World,” with his unintelligible croon wafting over like cigar smoke. It’s no hypermelodic “Postcards” or “Nantes,” but it’s nice in a crashing-in-your-hostel sort of way.

With the double-EP context tamping down expectations, chillout numbers like this are perfectly fine as a victory lap. But hopefully he either wakes up and gets to the rave (as the progression of the album makes it seem he might) or goes back inside where the toothless dudes are ready to gum his ear with more songs about willow trees. Last time he did a stopgap EP it had fucking “Elephant Gun” on it; when you can squeeze out a drunk-ballet instaclassic while waiting at Heathrow, why would you ever stoop to less?