The Top 20 Albums of 2011 - #3 - Beirut: The Rip Tide

The Top 20 Albums of 2011

#3 Beirut: The Rip Tide

Words by Dirk Calloway

Preface: I've been reviewing my favourite twenty albums of 2011, and today you're reading about the third best of the year. This is an ongoing series. You can check past reviews here.

My first encounter with Beirut was at a music festival called WOMAD in 2008. While I drank great wine, surrounded by friends and family, they played an open-air amphitheatre. It was a glorious night; one of those soft Autumn evenings when the air is still and the jumper you're wearing is enough to keep you warm. Beirut won me over within two songs, though I was insanely jealous of their brainchild Zach Condon. Sure, he seemed to exude nervous energy between songs, but he had learned to harness it, channel it even, into his band's beautiful music. In 2011, with their album The Rip Tide, Beirut fully delivered on that concert's promise:


From the opening strains of an accordion (played masterfully by Perrin Cloutier) on A Candle's Fire to the last chord of tubas, euphoniums and trumpets on Port of Call, this is clearly a band who have found their place in the world. They can no longer be called "Zach Condon's band", nor can they be written off as navel-gazing-wannabe-folk-musicians-multi-hyphenates. Nope, they're a true band, where each member is as essential as another. I witnessed this live in Wellington a month ago, where the band delivered a blistering concert that outstripped all of the expectations I'd built up for them since 2008. Of course, it may have helped that the venue was the perfect place to see them:

The gig proved to me that Condon had finally grown up. Previous albums have been plotted out and thematically linked to European locations, like a Gypsy's musical itinerary. Not The Rip Tide; it's rooted firmly in one place. The band's front-man said to The Guardian that "the vagabond thing – that was a teenage fantasy that I lived out in a big way. Music, to me, was escapism. And now I'm doing everything that is the opposite [of that] in my life. I'm married. I've got a house. I've got a dog. So it felt ridiculous, the narrative of what my career was supposed to be, compared to what I was actually trying to attempt in my life." He finally rid himself of the wandering sound with, appropriately enough, an incredibly heavy piano. You can hear it two-thirds of the way through on the below song:

I'm fairly sure it features on every track on the record. It's used to deepen the sound; it's been recorded to bring a warmth and ambience to the group that would otherwise be missing in the perfectly mixed arrangements. The piano brings a roughness and an edge to the proceedings that reminds you the group aren't trying to fill stadiums with polished radio-friendly tunes. Nope, they're hear to make music that keeps you warm. Perhaps that's happened because Condon wrote the songs in a log-cabin, heavily influenced by the songs that resulted from Justin Vernon's Bon Iver doing the same thing. Check out this gorgeous ballad, A Candle's Fire:

It soars with every horn riff. It reaches upwards, seeking higher and higher heights, just like a candle's fire does. Admittedly, the final hook is an uncredited lift of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Have You Ever Seen The Rain. But, you know what? It's a riff, it's not the main melody of the song, and the warmth the band exudes is just as comforting as John Fogerty's original howls: Beirut plays the same line with as if they're paying homage. It works. Just like everything else on this magnificent album. The only complaint I have with it is that the record's frontloaded with classic songs, and the truly great cuts aren't spread out enough through the tracklisting. Small complaint, given how perfect the first few tracks are. I'll look back on 2011 fondly because of The Rip Tide. I got it as a birthday present, and it'll forever make me glad I was listening to it when I turned 26.

Thanks heaps for reading this series. Check back tomorrow for the second best album of 2011. And click this link if you want to catch up on any reviews you might have missed.