Recap Beirut at The Congress Theater

When Beirut first appeared on the musical scene, most of the attention was focused on then-teenaged musical wunderkind Zach Condon and his multi-instrumental skills. Several years and many albums into the band’s career, Beirut continues to grow in stature and sound. (See: the band’s Saturday night headlining slot at this year’s Lollapalooza, albeit opposite My Morning Jacket and Eminem.) This year’s The Rip Tide has garnered accolades, with many noting its accessibility and shift away from the more traditional Eastern European sounds of the band’s past toward a more pop-oriented sensibility. But, just as at Lolla, the band showed last night’s enthusiastic crowd at the Congress Theater that as a live entity, it’s grown more comfortable even as it’s grown more popular.

Condon and company breezed through a stellar set, mixing songs old and new with ease, piano and horns weaving a technicolor tapestry with Condon’s croon. The band wasn’t helped by the Congress’ questionable acoustics, but the sound wasn’t as big an issue at the venue as other shows have experienced in the past. “Elephant Gun” transitioned easily into the shuffling “Vagabond” from The Rip Tide and, later, “Sunday Smile” had an equally pleasing pairing with “East Harlem,” another new track from Tide. It was the overarching theme of the evening, the gap between old and new songs bridged in the live setting.

After a rousing encore punctuated by the instrumental “Gulag Orkestar,” the band left the stage only to have Condon reemerge solo, armed with only a ukulele, to deliver “The Penalty.” The rest of the band joined him for the final song, another of the band’s several boisterous instrumentals. Condon isn’t the most gregarious frontman, muttering the occasional “thank you” after a song or offering up a small tidbit (“This song’s about my hometown,”) before launching into a song. But even without much dialogue, Condon still seems more at home on stage as a band leader than he has in the past.

Listening to the band last night, it felt as if Condon is incapable of writing a bad melody. But Beirut’s additional strengths lie in the layered complexity of those melodies, the aforementioned tapestry greater than the sum of its parts. And that comes from the backing band, particularly multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist Kelly Pratt, whose harmonies and outstanding trumpet duets with Condon helped propel the band to greater heights, especially on songs like the soaring “Santa Fe.” The band is no longer just Condon, but a cohesive whole led by Condon that continues to grow sonically as it solidifies its identity while still operating within the niche it’s carved out for itself.