Beirut, The Rip Tide
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
Zach Condon, Beirut’s wayfaring lead singer and composer, has coordinated himself into a unique musical position; with a focus on harmonious clashes between eastern-European brass bands and American indie-folk’s explorations of vocal layering to carry songwriting, Condon has managed to fit the niche of the accused hipster masses while remaining outside of time or place distinctions, giving his songs a timeless quality at best and sounding completely lost at worst.
With his velveteen, muted-trumpet voice, the singer can easily latch on to listeners’ emotional centers, with tales of sick children and drunken brutes and lovers separated by space and emotional distance pouring from his lips as easily as the wine pours into his Bohemian cup. His band’s masterful 2007 album, The Flying Club Cup, feels like a love letter to klezmer and the natural instrumentation of simpler times, with groaning horns and weeping strings, even a conch shell solo.
Beirut’s greatest strength is in this naturalistic vibrancy, even spontaneity, that can evoke a thousand souls mourning or celebrating as one, like a city of drunken revellers coming together to cheer or bellow to the stars on an electric summer’s night.
On The Rip Tide, Beirut’s first full-length release in four years, this city of souls has gotten smaller, really more of a village now, and Condon occasionally flounders despite his best intentions, but when the effect succeeds, it still has power unlike any other band in their field.
Condon’s past experiments with electronic instrumentation, noted most often by his attempts to use cheap keyboard effects, have been chintzy and distracting. Thus, listeners should be forgiven for being nervous when hearing these keyboard sounds opening the album’s first three songs.
But, with the exception of “Santa Fe,” a cheap and fairly flat attempt at sunnier pop than the band usually shoots for, these songs don’t fail in the ways that similar songs might have in the past. Condon has thankfully found a way to incorporate these modern ideas into the group’s classic aesthetic, and they no longer stick out so blatantly, at times providing pleasant backdrops to the otherwise stellar instrumentation on display.
Keys even provide a surprisingly affecting pulse in the album’s title track, forming a sort of beating heart behind the song’s sweeping melody. In fact, though at only nine tracks it’s hard to call it an accomplishment on the level of The Flying Club Cup, The Rip Tide is a much more subtle, much more pleasing record than could be produced by many of Condon’s peers.
The aforementioned title track is one of a few truly spectacular highlights throughout the album. Closer “Port of Call” earns its position, providing an exquisite slice of beauty and hopefulness as Condon navigates the sorrow and dangers of his life (“You had hope for me now./I danced all around it somehow./Be fair to me/I may drift a while”). It grows gradually and falls again into a knockout ending, a finish of such poignancy it couldn’t possibly be followed.
But the most common feeling the album elicits is not the grandeur of the band’s past, but rather an intimacy belied by the general make-up of the instruments at play. The clearest example of this is “Goshen,” a heartfelt piano lament to love lost that draws breaths as calmly as anything Condon has ever written. “East Harlem,” maybe the album’s most accessible track, punctuates its ideas conservatively. Whereas Condon would usually make choirs of his voice to sing every line as the piece grows to its climax, here he uses this technique on key words, sparing it from his occasional over-indulgence.
This more straightforward approach has its drawbacks. The “anything-can-happen” piquancy which makes their performances so dynamic is mostly sacrificed for clean timing and tight control. It no longer feels like the song could, and will, go absolutely anywhere depending on how one performer wants to take his cue. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Payne’s Bay.” The song’s first half implies this older idea of collaboration before dying away, returning as a very on-beat, repetitive belt of single-note ideas that kills the fun of the production before getting abruptly cut off.
Still, Condon knows how to hook listeners with emotional appeals that transcend simplistic songwriting. Even listeners who have a harder time picking through the unusual sounds at play, or who think every song sounds the same and need to familiarize themselves with the genres Condon is using, will still be able to connect with his voice as it guides them through fields and across oceans, never resting for long before presenting another tender and gallant surprise.