This is the fourth album from the precocious Zach Condon, a man who spent his boyhood recording orchestral tracks in his New Mexico bedroom. There is nothing on this record that suggests lo-fi budget recordings but he has lost none of his orchestral flair. The songs on The Rip Tide are many layered and rich. Each song weaving swells and eddies of Condon’s crooning baritone with brass, accordion, keyboard and choral crescendos.
On March of the Zapotec (previous album) Beirut experimented with being “fun and naive” rather than “leftfield”, and I suppose we can look at The Rip Tide as an attempt to do both. There is the cheery, upbeat and oddly computerised soul of ‘Santa Fe’ and ‘East Harlem’ set against the more abstract and atonal songs like ‘Vagabond’ and ‘Port of Call’. The album works as a marriage of these two impulses; sad and soulful but positive and purposeful. Perhaps Condon overestimates the whimsical presence in his music; when asked how he would represent his songs visually to a deaf person, he recommended showing them a picture of Isabella Rossellini in whale costume... Rossellini bathed in blue light singing cabaret in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet might be more accurate.
The first single from the album, ‘East Harlem’, has already been hotly tipped, picked by Pitchfork as their favourite new song. Condon wrote a version of it when he was 17 and has since resurrected it as a bubbling and melodic land-based sea shanty; “another rose lives in East Harlem, she’s waiting for the night to fall, a thousand miles between us, never make it home on time.” The song carries echoes of the melancholic humour of the Eels’ Daisies of the Galaxy, and offers up a lullaby of building refrains, trumpets and urgent piano. If we are sticking with the maritime theme, this is the song we’d most like to row to.
It must be admitted that there are a few songs on the album that are more suggestive of drowning than rowing. At times the turgid undercurrent of moaning vocals was a little too much to take and the songs were overwhelmed by their own weight. ‘The Rip Tide’ is very Pheonix-like but ultimately the synthetic, sliding brass became too much. The brass works much more beautifully on ‘Payne’s Bay’, twinned with lilting strings. The sound conjures up the brass bands of village fêtes, cucumber sandwiches and cricket clubs. My pick is the beautiful ‘Goshen’, which offers a much barer sound, as if the song had been stripped for parts. It reminds me of The Bees, Antony and the Johnsons, Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes and even Cold War Kids; it is great, if a little sad.
Like all Beirut records, this one rewards listening, re-listening and then listening again. The songs really do build pathways and echoes that become more and more resonant as you listen.