Among the new albums out today is the fantastic sophomore effort from Beirut, The Flying Club Cup. If you buy only one album this week, it should be this one. Here’s my review from this week’s cd reviews:

BEIRUT

The Flying Club Cup

(Ba Da Bing)

***1/2

The one-sheet story behind Beirut bandleader/singer/songwriter Zach Condon’s latest flight of fancy is that it landed him in France rather than the hazy Eastern Bloc of Gulag Orkestar. The album name comes from an early-20th-century hot-air-balloon festival held in Paris; Condon cites French chansons as an inspiration. The album’s artwork consists of found photographs from Paris and a vaguely Dadaist narrative written by Condon’s brother.

After the conch-shell orchestra tuning of “A Call to Arms,” the album opens with the subdued bossa-nova lilt of “Nantes,” Condon dourly singing, “It’s been a long time, long time now, since I’ve seen you smile” before giving in to swaying brass and wandering accordion. This is followed by the drifting, drunken uplift “A Sunday Smile.” As always, Beirut’s arrangements (here aided by the Arcade Fire’s Owen Pallet, who also sings lead on the elegiac “Cliquot”) are baroque without being bombastic. But the centerpiece remains Condon’s singular voice, a sonorous croon that easily rises above the orchestra pit but sounds just as sure with only a ukulele as accompaniment (as on the stunning first part of “The Penalty”). There are unexpected turns—the oriental strings of at the opening of “Forks and Knives (La Fete),” and the Peanuts-meets–Sufjan Stevens jazz piano lope of “In the Mausoleum”—but for the most part The Flying Club Cup sticks to Condon’s well-worn map of Europe. Condon’s lyrics, which were at times overwrought or overreaching on Gulag Orkestar, have grown more tempered and true.

Beirut’s albums are like flipping through an old box of postcards—the Balkans blur into East Germany into Paris back into Brooklyn—and whether they’re yours or someone else’s hardly matters. The maudlin “Guyamas Sonora” even seems to say as much: “No, I was not there/on the church stairs/the wind in my hair….” The New Mexico–born, Brooklyn-based Condon’s far-flung geography has always been at least half remembered or imaginary. But his remove doesn’t make his musical forays feel inauthentic or touristy. Rather, that distance lends his settings and subjects a sincere sense of longing and weight. ERIC GRANDY