Cutter argues that The Rip Tide is Condon’s most personal effort to date and, therefore, his favorite. He also goes to town bludgeoning a one trick pony metaphor to the point that we had to call in the Humane Society to get the son of a bitch to lay off. Hide yo wife, hide yo metaphors.
From: Cutter Davis
To: Brandon Hall
The harmonium and the pump organ are pretty similar, though not exactly the same. The accordion makes a similar sound but is held in the hand whereas the other two are free standing.
You’re welcome.
I don’t know what was being used most on these songs, either, though most reviewers seem to credit the sound that opens the album on “A Candle’s Fire” to a pump organ. Also, I wouldn’t say that he’s only using a trumpet in those horn sections – he’s using whole god damned horn sections in those horn sections! But it is, no doubt, less “baroque,” as you said. However, I don’t think the album is any less for it. To me this isn’t the album of someone bored or creatively blocked, but rather a portrait of a child growing into a man, strengthening his songwriting – which, how can you say his songwriting is getting stronger, while also disparaging the album as insignificant? – and crafting indelibly emotional songs that feel far more personal than anything I’d heard from him before.
In the sake of full disclosure, I was never a big Beirut fan. Gulag Orkestar, by most accounts, featured one amazing song, “Postcards from Italy,” and a bunch of scraps. Flying Club Cup was definitely an album full of fireworks but one I grew tired of relatively quickly. Maybe I didn’t give it a chance. I just remember getting annoyed by it at some point for some reason I can’t even remember right now, and I put it away. I think part of me felt like the album was a gimmick, like he took the sound Yann Tiersen made momentarily popular in Amelie, and used it to write pop songs, something not many people were doing in 2006, and everyone just lost their god damned minds.
Flying Club Cup was all detached melodrama and melancholy set in a world and a time that held no personal relevance, as far as I could see, to Condon. I kind of passed him off as a one trick pony. Now, with The Rip Tide, the pony is still doing the same tricks, I suppose, but it’s a really damn good trick. This pony does back flips. I can understand why people would geek out to see that.
And now, even better, these back flips are personal. To just bludgeon the shit out of this metaphor, the back flipping pony, much like the circus freak, has become the loneliest person in the room. In that Times article you referenced, Zach mentioned going through an identity crisis after his last tour, returning home, I “looking for a time when music was a little more innocent, and the pressure wasn’t there.” And the songs reflect this throughout the album. They aren’t of the Balkans or imaginary places in fairy tales, but of home. They’re called “Santa Fe,” his hometown, and “East Harlem.” The latter of which laments the distance between a love, “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.” On the beautiful title track piano ballad, “The Rip Tide,” he starts with “And this is the house where I / I feel alone…And this is the house where I / Could be unknown.” “The Rip Tide,” for what it’s worth, is my favorite track on the album, the way it swoons and swells, appropriately given its name, especially at the end, a piano in the foreground, a lonely trumpet in the background. This is what honesty feels like.
And that’s why I think I like this album. More so than Flying Club Cup. These are the songs of a young man, thrust rapidly into the spotlight at an incredibly young age, forced to try to make sense of it all. We all know how anything that was once fun, when turned into a business, can quickly stop being so. In every song, and there’s not a bad one in the lot, Condon is searching for home, for love, for peace of mind. Having found fame, now all he wants is home, superstardom be damned. A return to the flourishes and bombast of Flying Club Cup would have been inappropriate on this album.
“He’s the only one who knows the words,”
Cutter
AudioVole 
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