BEIRUT - The Flying Club Cup LP

Label: Pompeii

The Flying Club Cup is the second studio album by Balkan folk-influenced band Beirut.

Zach Condon said about the name and inspiration for the album: "Back in the early 1990s...there used to be this hot air balloon festival in Paris---[the album's] titled after that and after this very bizarre 1910 photo I found [by Leon Gimpel].

It's one of the first color photos ever made, at the World's Fair, and it...shows all these ancient hot air balloons about to take off in the middle of Paris. I just thought it was the most surreal image I'd seen in a long time."

He also said about the album sound: "I was listening to a lot of Jacques Brel and French chanson music--pop songs shrouded in big, glorious, over-the-top arrangements and all this drama--and that was in some sense unfamiliar territory to me --very much throwing myself in the world of classic pop music, I guess you could say."