Beirut – The Rip Tide
Pompeii
The joy of Zach Condon’s previous records as Beirut was how they took you far from music’s usual shores. Here was a romantic ukulele and trumpet player from Sante Fe, New Mexico — on the face of it, his music should have sounded unbearably whimsical. But his debut, Gulag Orkestar, was filled with the sound of rambunctious Balkan brass, making you feel like a drunk tourist who’d stumbled across a gypsy wedding.
Its follow-up, The Flying Club Cup, contained all the drama and orchestration of classic French chanteurs. And then there was the ‘March of the Zapotec’ double EP, where he collaborated with a Mexican funeral band.
So the initial disappointment of The Rip Tide is that it doesn’t repeat the trick. He clearly hasn’t spent the last three years hanging out with old highlife acts in Ghana, or even sitting in a rainy Halifax with unemployed colliery bands.
There’s still plenty of brass, still plenty of songs told from the perspective of a weary traveller, but what the record actually sounds like is one made by a romantic ukulele and trumpet player from Santa Fe. He finally seems comfortable relying on his own songwriting for a record, rather than reaching for the exotic to carry him through.
In recent interviews, he’s been talking about how he’s got married and finally stopped living out of suitcases. That probably explains a lot. There are only nine short songs here, but they include some of his best, and in ‘The Peacock’, definitely his most emotional.
You will get the occasional feeling he could do better, especially lyrically (when a highlight is the line, “Sound is a colour, I’m gold,” you know you’re in trouble). But that’s more something to complain about if not fixed for the next album. The guy’s just discovered himself, for God’s sake; give him time to explore. Alex Marshall
