The Rip Tide
Beirut
The Rip Tide is nothing new from Beirut. Same waltz rhythms, same dignified, dramatic vocals, same prominent ukulele. But when same as always sounds as good as Rip Tide it’s a bit useless to complain. Although the band has received critical and fan adoration since its debut album (back when Beirut was just another name for Zach Condon), they still sound as if they’re only now coming into their own. Rip Tide is yet another step forward for the band, even if each album they’ve released could have served as a successful end of the road.
Backtracking a little, it’s a bit broad strokes to say that nothing has changed on Rip Tide. A different sort of pop sound now sits next to the Balkan influences that so defined Beirut’s first two albums. With their Motown pianos and joyful rhythms, “Santa Fe” and “Vagabond” are a nice shock to the Beirut system, giving their sound a new dimension while not actually shifting it into completely novel territory.
Beirut’s origins have always served as a good causal story for the band’s success. After travelling through Europe as a teenager, Condon released Gulag Orkestar, an album that managed to sound both exotic and familiar as it appropriated the folk music of the Balkan countries in particular. Condon took on a sound foreign to most of his listener’s years and endowed it with an endearing wistfulness.
That wistfulness is present as ever on Rip Tide: in the lyrics that are often founded in memory; in the sound that, if timeless, is so because it recalls music we associate with the past; in the mournful trumpets mixed with military drums, which give so many of the songs the feel of resolute, chin-held-up funeral marches. But if Condon was once able to take foreign sounds and reintroduce them to a Western audience, Beirut as a band has now taken Condon’s original sound and made it much more than a re-appropriation: it now stands firmly on its own even as it reaches out to other lands and times.
Beirut play the Phoenix on Thursday.
