I'd rather be watching Firefly

I'm always curious about which way music's going to progress to next.

Shh, I'm trying  hard to avoid pretension here. 

Back in the tenth grade, when punk was beginning its super saturation of everything everywhere and we'd yet to see the machinations of dance-punk sweep over, again, everything, I was telling my friends that synthesizers were going to dominate music, popular or no, before long. Sure, affixing "core" to the end of everything was awesome, and it was great how every flippant chearleader and pot-smoking jock in my high school insisted that they loved punk and emo (Dashboard Confessional/My Chem/FOB and Bright Eyes singles respectively) to death, but it wasn't going to last. A few years down the road, I asserted, punk's going to be a joke and all the bands we listened to wouldn't have made the least bit of impact on music's real history.

Of course, I still wore my Sparta shirt and listened to Taking Back Sunday every single day. The point is I at least knew better.  I put my TheSTART on and committed to memory the synthesized noodlings of The Cinema Eye and Thunderbirds Are Now! and the Stiletto Formal and I believed.

And now what've we got? Samples and synthesizers are standard issue building blocks of music, attached to every genre under the sun. Artists featuring neither aren't taken seriously unless they're doing the country or folk thing, and in that case a band's expected to at least feature myriad traditional and orcehstral instruments to even in out. I'm seeing the term "guitar band" used more and more as a pejorative. "Dance punk" seems to function like ipecac on anyone with ears, punk's going to be recovering from an overexposure hangover for the next several decades, and even mentioning emo is liable to get you shot dead.

I was right, motherfuckers.

I like it, really. The somewhat unpalatable glitch-folk of Grandaddy and A Sun Came/Enjoy Your Rabbit era Sufjan have given way to the absolutely gorgeous likes of Akron/Family, Chad Vangaalen, Grizzly Bear, and Califone. Synth and chamber-pop laden rock, born, I think, principally out of Canadian acts like the Unicorns and Broken Social Scene have flourished through too many artists to name. Electronica, more than any other, has absolutely exploded in popularity and sheer creativity.  This has been a renassaince deliciously devoid of posturing and icon-dependence, and possesses a fantastically down to earth sensibility and warmth that I hope has got years left in it.

But my curiosity's piqued again. Where's music headed to now? Everyone I've talked to seems to have been astonished and pleased by the country and folk revivals of the past few years, but I don't think these fixations have much further to go. I don't see a reversion to guitar rock or punk as feasibly possible for at least another generation, so what else is there?  

Metal's started to enjoy some more widespread and creative exposure, with bands like Sunn 0))), Agalloch, and Boris incorporating radically new approaches to a stereotypically burnt out genre, along with being increasingly well received amongst different audiences. But metal is extraordinarly tough to predict, and any branch of extreme music is going to have to overcome an absolutely staggering stigma amonst non-believers to go critical in the way punk and electronica have in the new millenium.

Is it going to be world music?  I genuinely can't think of where else things could head. It plays directly into the current prediliction for folk and country, doesn't it?

I've got hints of this direction through Man Man and Gogol Bordello, but mostly I've been thinking this because I love Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, way too damn much.

Beirut has a population of one, officially. Zach Condon plays, and I quote: "Horns, violins, celli, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars)." Holy shit, celli? I don't think that's a word. What pushes the arrangement into indie-kid wet dream territory is the contribution of two bonafide Neutral Milk Hoteliers in the mix. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Tros, presently of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, lend percussion and violin with the same poignancy and understated grace they brought to Mister Mangum's seminal masterpieces, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

It sounds like a mess on paper, and the unorthodox instrumentation can indeed sound a bit sloppy, but this is by and large a terrificly focussed, richly colourful swath of music. Sparklingly exotic balkan melodies are hijacked into beautiful pop songs of the Western persuasion. The tone is overwhelmingly depressed, but sad music has never, ever felt so organic and toe-tappingly alive. It's far, far removed from dance music, but I find it impossible to sit still through the album's indescribably lovely movements.

I tend to sway.

Zach's robust yet ineffably pubescent warble sets down an entirely new path of melancholia, and his miniature orchestra of vibrantly mournful brass and woodwind - and whatever category the accordian falls under - blends unbelievably well. There are lyrics here, but the most brilliantly poetic verses on the album feature Zach giving himself over entirely to worldless wailing, as in the excellent closer After the Curtain and album's heart Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).

Jeremy Barnes's simplistic but rich drumming, favouring a steady bass thump covered in various exulting cymbals, does a superb job of grounding the precocious Condon and his symphony. It's easy to recall NMH throughout, especially flavours of Holland, 1945, The Fool, and Ghost. Barnes is a truly excellent percussionist, and his work here showcases the drums as a viably beautiful sound, not simply a timepiece.

The album is remarkably consistent, and I'm sure the greatest criticism which will be levelled against is its tendency toward sameness. I can forgive it for that, personally. In fact, the greatest departure from Gulag Orkestar's magnificient sound, the near-electronica blips of Scenic World, turn out to be the album's weakest moment. The fantastically realized old-country sound that pervades most all the rest of the album is too good to let go of.

I'm tired and Douglas Coupland isn't helping one bit.