Beirut: The Shrew | NPR MUSIC FRONT ROW

How does a band return from a recording hiatus that could have permanently displaced it from the audience’s eye? If you are Zach Condon and Beirut, you just go about your business and pick up where you left off three years earlier. The group’s First Listen Live show at Brooklyn’s intimate Bell House on a rainy September night, a concert debuting many of the songs from the brand new No No No, its first album since 2011, showed that Beirut works through its obstacles. Maybe it helps when the initial idea behind a band is ahead of the curve to begin with, no? When Condon’s Beirut first came to prominence in 2006, it emerged from Santa Fe with a fully conceived, pan-global folk sound unlike any indie sensibilities popular on the day. Zach’s trumpet and flugelhorn playing was informed by local Mexican mariachi horns, his engagement with the Roma brass bands of the Balkans, and modal jazz changes via a percolating bossa nova; he favored timeless instruments (ukuleles, accordions) and imag