BEIRUT – The Rip Tide (Part 1)

Brandon pens a lovely letter to his old friend, Cutter Davis, about his inability to get laid in college. It may or may not have anything to do with Beirut’s third LP, The Rip Tide, out now on his very own imprint, Pompeii. Is this young Zach Condon’s holding pattern or a harbinger for the future? Stay tuned to find out!

From: Brandon Hall
To: Cutter Davis

Dude is 25. After 3 LPs, and a double EP, Zach Condon has established himself as an Indie superstar – a well-deserved accolade, I would argue, after 2007’s resplendent Flying Club Cup – a stunning, precocious, and prodigious piece of work that blew his debut, Gulag Orkestar, (and hell, just about everything else) clean out of the water. He was 21 when that came out. 21. Do you know what I was doing when I was 21?

A. Not getting laid.
B. Making really bad student films.
C. Writing really bad poetry.
D. Not even getting close to getting laid.

Not Zach. Dude was reinventing the pop song in the image of a drunken Turk on the streets of Paris. And probably getting laid.

Since then, he released a double EP, March of the Zapotec/Holland, which saw him stretching his sound beyond ukelele, accordion, and E♭ horns, going south of the border, Mariachi style, on March of the Zapotec and electro/glitch-pop on Holland. While I wasn’t a big fan of either direction, it’s always good to see an artist exploring beyond his borders and it certainly left the door open for what was to come next – which, talented as Condon had proven himself to be, could have been anything.

What it turned out to be was The Rip Tide, a stripped down, slighter version of, well, of what Beirut does. Condon told the New York Times (see, dude is a superstar) earlier this year that he wanted to do away with the baroque excesses of his previous efforts in exchange for a more limited palette, and he more or less delivers. Ukelele, trumpet/cornet, keys – that’s pretty much what you get on this album, with, of course, some accordion, or pump-organ, or harmonium, or…am I being redundant? Are these all the same instrument? I don’t know what he’s using but it’s a hell of a lot less than what he had been using.

And I want to note that he’s no less talented now than he ever was. In fact, his song writing actually seems only to get stronger with every ensuing year, which it god damn better at 25. And I keep bringing up his age because, really, his whole life, making music or not, is ahead of him and this album, both in sound, scope, and length (only 33 minutes, his shortest yet, shorter, even, than his double EP) feels like an artist in a holding pattern, unsure of his next step. Condon knows what he can do – orchestrate the fuck out of a billowing, melodramatic pop song with horns, strings, and that iconic warble in his smoky voice from somewhere in the 19th century – and he does it. But without any of the thrill or fanfare that accompanied Flying Club Cup.

The Rip Tide, to me, feels like the result of someone who might be bored with his music. It feels a bit like Radiohead’s In Rainbows or King of Limbs – the products of a band so staid and confident in their ways and abilities that they just laid down some tracks and put it out, knowing, at the very least, it wasn’t going to be bad. But Radiohead has been around almost twenty years now. It’s okay for them to be old men eating peanut butter in their rocking chairs yelling at kids to get off their lawn. Condon’s fresh out of the womb, by comparison.

I think this album is going to be a checkpoint in his career. He’s either going to launch himself from this album into an entirely new trajectory, new sounds, new ambitions, or he’s going to keep making very good if unspectacular Parisian inspired albums that probably will never be a disappointment, but will likely dull that superstar sheen.

Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if he became a novelist or poet or professor in his 30s. Dude is only 25.

“You’re on in five / It’s time you rise / Or fade,”

Brandon