Beirut - The Rip Tide

Beirut The Rip Tide (2011, Pompeii Records) Grade: A- Beirut is not for everyone. When I first heard the group on The Flying Cup Club it was the otherworldly sound that drew me in: haunting, languid, beautiful, textured. Using old world instruments (ukulele, accordion, trombone, tuba), Zach Condon, the leader, created a lush mid-century Eastern European maudlin soundscape. The band took the same approach on March of the Zapotecas, exploring the norteño sound—with mixed results.

The Rip Tide marks Condon’s return to the Eastern European diaspora, but this time the influence is more a supporting character rather than as the lead. On this album, Condon himself is the star attraction. The beauty—and perhaps difficulty—with Beirut is giving yourself the time to let his albums soak through you. One listen is not going to allow you to fully understand the complexities of the music. The music Condon creates is rich and luxurious, and he plays with it within the songs to great results, suddenly changing the tempo or adding in an unexpected instrument or even stripping the song down to bare essentials mid-tune.

Accounts of how the album was created all seem to indicate that Condon recorded songs with the full band in the studio and then took them home to edit alone. This is evident on almost all the songs, which have an introspective tenor. The lyrics in particular indicate more of an interior journey for Condon, with the sentiment of being alone and lost—and it being his fault sometimes—repeated over and over.

Clocking in at a little over 30 minutes, Rip Tide initially felt more like an EP, but upon repeated listening the personal tone and depth of the songs draw you in and time begins to slow. It’s amazing how much he fit in in such a short time.

“Santa Fe”, a love song to his hometown, has almost synth-like beats that support the song with gorgeous, overflowing orchestration over top. “East Harlem” is a torch song about a love that failed to happen, and he’s taking the blame: “another rose wilts in East Harlem / and uptown, downtown / a thousand miles between us / she’s waiting for the night to fall / let it fall / I’ll never make it in time.” This song is much sparser musically, until it begins to swell at the end where he talks about “sound is the color I know / her eyes / sound is that keeps me looking for your eyes / and sound of your breath in the cold / and then the sound will bring me home again.” It’s as if music (“the sound”) is his only way out of whatever hole he’s dug himself into, his only salvation.

“Goshen” is a sad piano tune about performing and giving yourself up to the desires of the crowd and perhaps betraying your true self at the same time. “you’re on in five / it’s time you rise or fail…the lights are down / go on inside, they’ve paid…you’re not the girl i used to know / what would you hide from such a glow / if I had only told you so.” And again at the end here, this theme of him being at fault.

The title track’s music is full and rising, but still somehow a slow dance alone as he sings about solitude and loneliness: “and this is the house where I / I feel alone / feel alone now / and this is the house where I / could be unknown / be alone now.” This is a gorgeous song, full of melancholy and relinquished control. He follows this with “Vagabond” whose playful, almost frolicking music is completely the opposite of the sentiment: “left a bag of bones / a trail of stones / for to find my way home…and i am lost and not found.”

The album ends with “Port of Call”, which has a folk song feel that pulls in tuba and trombone at the end to swell the song. This song is about how he was alone, and though he seems to have found someone, he wants to be adrift for now. “and you / you had hope for me now / I danced all around it somehow / be fair to me / I may drift a while…don’t want to be there for no one / I can’t be saved.”

Condon has again created a deliciously textured album, full of wonderful sounds weaved together. The Rip Tide, for me, is a great album because Condon really put himself out there in his lyrics, which makes the music register that much more personally with the listener. This is an album about being alone in life, and perhaps, trying to get a little redemption before it’s too late.