Hadsel, Joe

I close my eyes (for real, they are closed as I type this), and I picture myself somewhere far away, halfway across the globe, somewhere dusty but urbanized, sitting a small table at a café with outside seating, across from Pam, and we're sipping on cups of tea and we're maybe on vacation or something, just me and her, and I'm wearing a nice light-colored outfit, something genteel but casual somehow at the same time, and we're relaxed. That's the main thing: relaxed. And this is the music I hear.

Okay, eyes open. Back at the office, in a cage in the basement, no ventilation, cut off from the outside world for four hours at a time. I'm fine, but I'm not relaxed. Not really. Beirut gets me almost there, though. They are trying their fucking damnedest, and I appreciate the effort. Maybe that's why I've always liked this band, despite the fact that a lot of their music sounds alike and a lot of it is impenetrable in a way that different cultures feel impenetrable to outsiders (read: tourists). Life is full of so many little agitations and so many micro-anxieties and so many depressing monotonous humdrum minutes that pass away like hours or days, and occasionally it feels nice to be confronted with music that juxtaposes that feeling, juxtaposes and then some.

I listened to Hadsel a few times when it came out last November, but it got lost in the hustle and bustle that is end-of-year list-making and what have you, its own kind of fun stress-inducer. That's no time to take in a new Beirut album, especially one that was made in the Norwegian darkness in a secluded church in the snow using an old pump organ. This is one that you need to spend some time with. Not because it reveals secrets or because it has untold depths or whatever. No, it's just that you need time to meet it in its own space, at its own pace, which is: slow, calm, relaxed.

And sitting here now, the time between 2:38 PM and 2:44 PM feeling like a fucking eternity, I have the space and the time, fitting it all in amongst the eternity that is a boring job. (It is in this way that I really don't understand how someone could ever say they "don't have time" to participate in Record Club. So much of our lives feel like the moments in between the moments that count, and so many of us unconsciously choose to fill the moments in between with mindless scrolling. You could be out there listening to new-to-you music. You could be out there taking a trip inside the mind. You could be out there listening to Beirut!)

My favorite Beirut song is "Elephant Gun," but mostly because of the time and place in which I discovered it, and the breadth of the song that is willing to carry that water through the decades. My favorite Beirut album is No No No, the only Beirut album willing to cull away the Eastern folk frills upon which Beirut built their name and legacy, and dares to focus on simple keyboard melodies and mindless drum machine loops. My love for both of these pieces of work betrays a possible misunderstanding that I have about this wonderfully idiosyncratic band.

While Hadsel doesn't necessarily get back to the busy Balkan folk sounds of Gulag Orkestar or The Flying Club Cup, it does manage to capture the spirit of those early discs: the other-worldliness, the fanciful trumpet salvos, the serenity. Zach Condon's voice, a soothingly baritone as always, a clarion call to find yourself somewhere else, away from all this. Hadsel eschews a full band and simply layers some soft hand-drumming and shakers on top of guitar (or ukelele) strumming and the constant low hum of that ancient pump organ.

That Hadsel was made under personally trying circumstances for Condon, on the verge of a mental break and in consequential search for tranquility in winter darkness of the upper Nordic regions, proves that sometimes we don't know ourselves and our gifts nearly as well as one might think (else he'd turn to his own work for emotional support). That Hadsel marks a successful turn from the darkness and into the light for both artist and audience proves that Beirut is still the best at the very specific thing that they do and have always done.

I don't think it's a mark against Hadsel that I can rarely tell the songs apart, even after constant and repeated listens over the past week (in additional to sporadic listens up until the point when Rachel chose it for Record Club). That's not really what it's here for. It's less a collection of songs and more one unifying experience, the thrum of the organ playing at times like a carnival but more often than that playing like a heartbeat, slow, steady, at rest.

I am nowhere close to my happy place, not relaxed, no, not here in this drab office building, by myself in a stuffy enclosed space, doing nothing of note (clearly). But when I blast Hadsel out of the speakers and close my eyes and breath deep and take it all in, I can get surprisingly close. I am calm. I am far away. I am relaxed.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5