The Rip Tide

iTunes Review

At 33 minutes in length, 2011’s The Rip Tide flutters into your head, plays your heartstrings and ends leaving you wanting more. In that small amount of time Zach Condon and company drop some impressively huge songs. The Rip Tide was built with sweeping string sections, grand horn arrangements, vintage keyboards and various other tasteful flourishes. This layered approach allows Beirut’s economically arranged baroque-pop songs to play like exquisite pocket-compositions starting with the handsome opener “A Candle’s Fire.” The band honors their hometown on the following “Santa Fe” where Krautrock-influenced repetitions pulse and throb giving Condon ample room for his barbed melodies to unfurl and then grapple the listener. They switch coasts on “East Harlem” where an old pump-organ wheezes before piano, percussion and lazy horns seep in to sound somewhat inspired by an old fashioned New Orleans funeral. Longtime fans who miss the band’s more melancholy moments will feel right at home with the lonesome “Goshen.” Conversely, “Payne’s Bay” is the most poppy ditty here.