Beirut’s third LP, The Rip Tide, is either Zach Condon’s best effort to date or a minor work that sees a prodigious and incredibly young talent in a holding pattern. Depends on who you ask. Brandon and Cutter had at it and one man emerged victorious.
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
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 was 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
From: Brandon Hall
To: Cutter Davis
I must say, Cutter, you make a compelling argument. After reading your post and listening to the album a couple more times, I was ready to jump on board. You’re right, there’s not really a bad song on the album, not a single song I would deign to skip. And for that matter, I don’t think I was “disparaging the album.”
I really like how the fire motif that runs through the album, starting with the first track, “A Candle’s Fire,” which, he reminds us, “is just a flame.” Easily extinguished, like fame, like love. It continues in “Payne’s Bay” (“I can’t put on your fire”), and in “The Peacock” (“Infernal heat can’t take the sound in here”). And along with this motif is the constant, overbearing sense of cold – “East Harlem” (“The sound of your breath in the cold”), “Payne’s Bay” (“I can’t belong to the winter”), “Vagabond” (“Now as the air grows cold”), and, again, “The Peacock” (“There’s an answer for I’m cold again”). This almost doesn’t do it justice, because that feeling of cold is overbearing throughout the album – appropriate given the miserable winter New York went through while he was writing and recording. The fire and heat that appears occasionally through The Rip Tide seem only to serve as ephemeral breaks in the isolating cold, fleeting respites that ultimately fail to break the wintery oppression.
So I like all of that. I really like the album. But then do you know what I did? I put on Flying Club Cup and remembered, “Oh, right. Zach Condon can do amazing things. He can write monumental, sweepingly romantic songs with bombast and energy and, yes, melodrama.” A lot of people I don’t consider audiophiles or indie-nerds have exclaimed excitement about “the new Beirut.” They don’t read Pitchfork or Stereogum. I would be surprised if most of them knew who Neutral Milk Hotel was. But they’re pumped for Beirut. That’s a sign of a dude that’s gone mainstream. Throw him on an iPod commercial and it’ll be over. You know why so many people know who this kid is? Flying Club Cup.
That puppy just sweeps you off your feet and carries you away. And you know me, Cutter. I’m a hopeless romantic. I want to be swept off my feet!
I do really like The Rip Tide. But it’s a minor work. Twenty-five years from now, if Condon is still making music, or even if he’s not, we’ll look back on his career, and a lot of attention will be paid to Flying Club Cup while The Rip Tide will be the “transition album” or the “follow-up album” if it’s remembered at all. And were the two albums switched, I doubt that half as many people would be excited for his third LP.
But I want to briefly talk about One Trick Ponies, because I think that’s an interesting topic in popular music. A great painter, for example, has the skills and ability to paint in all styles, to mimic all the greats. Salvador Dalí or Picaso, for example, could paint in any style and after achieving a mastery of their art, moved to explore their own voices. Sufjan Stevens, for one, has proven an ability to do the same in music. He can out ballad the balladeers, out glitch the electro-produces, out rock the shoegazers, out indie the indie kids. He is, beyond a doubt, a master and could never be called a one trick pony at this point.
As for Beirut, this video of them joining The National on stage to sing “Fake Empire” struck me:
Condon just bludgeons the shit out of that song with his trademark vocal warble. Is that the only way he can sing? Because really, for that song, listen to The National’s Matt Berninger and follow him! If you’re going to accompany someone else on his song, you should be able to do the song justice by singing appropriately. It bothered the hell out of me, because, as you know, The National are kind of my favorite band and that song’s fucking awesome and Condon couldn’t just harmonize and sing it straight. He had to do his Beirut thing. But maybe that’s all he can do.
I mean, even if your pony does back flips, eventually you want to see it do something else, right? Even a back flipping pony gets old.
But for that matter, and this confuses me a bit, the National don’t really switch it up on every album, either. Since Alligator, the National sound like the National. I mean I like Alligator the best, but I can pretty much listen to any of their albums over and over again without tiring of it. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why I cut The National more slack than I’m willing to cut anyone else. Of course, not every other band has two classically trained guitarists writing their music. And they’re meticulous enough that they can pretty much guarantee a good to great album, if not a transcendent one, every time. But maybe it’s just because as objective as I want to be, I can still be a bit of a fan-boy.
If the National are a one trick pony, their trick is giving blowjobs, apparently. Because that never gets old!
“What would you ask a campfire,”
Brandon
From: Cutter Davis
To: Brandon Hall
If closer, “Port of Call” doesn’t sweep you off your feet, you don’t have a soul. A brief, heart wrenching sample: “And you / You had hope for me now / I danced all around it somehow / Be fair to me / I may drift awhile”
He’s drifting, Brandon. Be fair to him for fuck’s sake!
And don’t get me started on the title track, which I already mentioned, but seriously, if these songs don’t move you, then “hopeless” really is the operative word in your cliched self-description. This album is pared down, and that seems to me a sign of maturity. If a simple melody and lyric are already beautiful, why deck it out in fancy accoutrements and flourishes? What do the songs on Flying Club Cup gain from having 15 or 20 parts a piece? They just get busy and crowded. They’re fun and beautiful, but I think The Rip Tide shows that his songs are fun and beautiful without the excess. They’re so finely crafted that you can leave the boxes of instruments in the garage and still find yourself awash in melancholy and heartache. Now how can you not love that?
As for The National, we all have our bands. That’s what makes music fun. And art and literature and film, for that matter. I really like The National, too. I’m always anxious to hear their next album and they’re selling out arenas now for a reason. But I also don’t geek out about them the way you do. Because what you say is true – The National sound like The National. They make really god damn good occasionally maudlin music about growing up and growing old in America. It doesn’t hurt that the Dessner brothers also write and perform music with Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. There’s some God’s honest talent in that band – though I don’t know I’ve ever gotten a blowjob from them, but hey, that’s your thing. Congrats, on that.
And I agree that Zach Condon’s vocal performance in that clip was egregious. But I think that’s less Condon’s problem, and more just a bad idea to have him sing alongside Matt Berninger. I mean, I wouldn’t expect Berninger to be able to do a knockout accompaniment of a Beirut song, either. And I sure as shit don’t imagine he can sing in any fashion beyond his own. That doesn’t make him a bad singer or less of an artist, it just means he probably shouldn’t team up with Condon any time soon.
I don’t think it’s fair, necessarily, to compare master painters to pop musicians either. You’re right about Sufjan Stevens. That guy really is a master. And Dali and Picasso were masters as well. But true masters of an art form are few and far between. It’s unfair and wrongheaded to demand that every great artist also have transcendental abilities to mimic every other great artist. If that were the case, you’d be excited about one or two musicians every 15 years. How lame would that be?
“Filled your glass with gin / Filled your heart with pride,”
Cutter
AudioVole 
Discussion
No comments yet.