Now Condon has Paris

Last spring, Beirut’s Zach Condon moved to Paris. Why might the 21-year-old multi-instrument prodigy, whose album of Balkan-infused chamber-folk “Gulag Orkestar” was one of 2006’s most blogged-about debuts, need to skip out the country?

“I was spending time in places like Williamsburg, which can be like a Disneyland of art students,” Condon said, laughing. “France is my escape from responsibility.”

Phobias of Wesleyan trust-funders not withstanding, Condon’s recent move to the 20th Arrondissement seems especially appropriate. His new CD, “The Flying Club Cup,” evokes the pomade-heavy orchestral pop of French crooners Charles Aznavour and Serge Gainsbourg in the same way that “Orkestar” laced Condon’s wistful folk songs with Gypsy campfire-band flourishes.

The idea of a Brooklyn indie rocker writing his own “Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus” will likely chill your spine (who would play Jane Birkin -- Lily Allen?). But Condon has the rich tenor pipes and brilliantly overblown arrangement savvy to make it work. Condon, who has a two-night stand at the Avalon starting Wednesday, doesn’t see “Flying Club” as an act at playing ethnic-pop dress-up.

“I never try to just mimic other music,” Condon says. “I’d never want to come across as a musical tourist. But there’s such a large palette of sounds in the world, it’d be a shame not to dip into them.”

Indeed, in “Flying Club,” Condon takes on France the same way Fitzgerald or Hemingway did in their heyday -- as a foreigner making no apologies for drinking deeply from the City of Light’s mythology.

On his first-ever tour last year, Condon was hospitalized in Paris with “extreme exhaustion.” If “Flying Club” is any indication, he seems to have forgiven his new hometown for knocking the wind out of him.

“We were 11 people in a van making 17-hour drives, and we didn’t know how to say no,” Condon said. “Basically, the doctors said, ‘You haven’t slept in two months and your body is very angry with you.’ ”

The metal band behind the mask

If Gorillaz made the idea of an animated pop band safe for mass consumption, the Hessians of Dethklok are out to make it face-crushingly intense. The cartoon stars of the “Adult Swim” show “Metalocalypse” are breaking the fourth wall and embarking on their first “tour” of sorts, to coincide with the release of their new album, “Dethalbum.”

Dethklok is largely the work of show co-creator Brendon Small, who takes most of the instrumental duties on the album along with writing and voicing the show. The tour, for which dates are in the works, will feature a set-long animated projection that will serve as the “band” onstage, with live musicians (including Small) playing behind it.

“It’s like Gorillaz but funnier and way more brutal,” Small said. “The show is like a ballet, you don’t watch the orchestra pit.”

Will metal fans take Dethklok’s live incarnation as a mockery of their culture?

“As long as the music is brutal, metal-heads will like that we like what they like,” Small said. “We’re more interested in keeping this a big stupid comic book.”

august.brown@latimes.com