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Apr 30, 2025 Web Exclusive By Celine Teo-Blockey

If 2023’s Hadsel was Zach Condon of Beirut emerging from a trough of depression, divorce, and vocal distress, with clear-eyed focus and a perverse sense of pleasure from the endless night and snow of the Norwegian surrounds he’d retreated to, A Study of Losses is a quiet acceptance and willingness to skate along the now even-tempered tide as daylight breaks and becomes abundant. As such, “Disappearances and Losses,” the opening instrumental, acts like a prelude, with softened organ chords harking daybreak.

Immediately, on “Forest Encyclopedia” there’s a giving over to bigger forces—“I think I’ll be thankful / Live like the breeze…Whoever you are / I’ll leave the keys / Long past the time / Of my misery.” This album in more ways than one is bigger than just Condon’s personal trials, it’s the environmental loss of a paradisiacal atoll in the South Pacific (“Tuanaki Atoll”), an extinct species of Tiger (“Caspian Tiger),” an ancient, architectural wonder lost to time (“Villa Sacchetti”), and the more abstract loss of an ageing screen legend’s beauty (“Garbo’s Face”).

Condon was commissioned by a Swedish circus troupe, Kompani Giraff, to soundtrack their theatrical performance A Study of Losses, based on an adaptation of Judith Schalansky’s 2018 German novel An Inventory of Losses. In her own words, Schalansky describes her book as a “personal cabinet of curiosities of natural and cultural objects that no longer exist.” There are 12 essays with vastly different literary styles and subjects all linked by themes of loss and impermanence.

Employing church organs, baroque instrumentation, modern synths, brass, and ukulele, Condon delivers Beirut’s seventh album of an exhaustive, 18 tracks. Is that a cha-cha beat on “Mani’s 7 Books?” The standouts are “Villa Sachetti” with its clavier-like finger-strumming over the best of Condon’s mournful lilt, the “Elephant Gun”-era echoes on jaunty “Tuanaki Atoll,” the hint of a love story folded into the slowburn, melancholy of “Caspian Tiger,” and the freshness of outlier “Guericke’s Unicorn.”

Seven of the 18 tracks are extended instrumental pieces that the troupe requested in order to tease out the full length of the show. Taking inspiration from the story about a selenographer on the moon tasked with cataloguing all life on Earth, Condon names the instrumentals after the lunar mares: once incorrectly believed to be seas, these are the dark craters on the moon’s surface so immense we can see them from earth.

These interludes are like experiencing string quartets in the gothic churches throughout Europe. Churches themselves forgotten relics of a time when religion formed the cornerstone of life. These cavernous spaces, now so separate from your every day that they boldly punctuate that moment you’re finally on holiday to a destination you’ve been planning, pinning between hours of drudgery. “Oceanus Procellarum,” named after the largest lunar mare, features beatific string arrangements and brought me back to a chapel in Venice that I had almost forgotten. The quartet I don’t remember, but the feeling of being overcome remains.

The book concerns itself with how to make absences visible and Condon’s songwriting is about what emotions are conjured when words fail. This trifecta of a circus troupe, bizarre as it sounds, seems to work as a musical experiment.

It is in perhaps starting Pompeii, his own record label (Hadsel was the first album released on his imprint), that Condon has found the freedom to take on such an unusual project as the musical accompaniment for clowns. Yet, he has brought his usual gravitas and gifted us with a musical balm for present maladies. And treated us to the best kind of vacances when one can’t afford to buy a plane ticket. (www.beirutband.com)

Author rating: 7/10