Beirut

Since Beirut’s last album, 2007’s The Flying Club Cup, many have asked where Beirut leader Zach Condon’s songs would voyage next. Lots of guesses, but few predicted the inward journey Condon has achieved on The Rip Tide, an album with the most introspective and memorable songs of his young career.

Lyrically, Condon exposes a depth of honesty that outstrips the simplified nomadic troubadour image of his past. The songs speak of love, friendship, isolation and community, touching on universal human themes that are less fabricated stories than impressions of life at a quarter century of age. Songs are no longer about imagining places you haven’t been, they’re about places of which we are all extremely familiar, some of them too familiar.

The album is on Pompeii Records, a label started and wholly owned by Condon. Pompeii is a fully independent, artist run label, releasing The Rip Tide internationally. This extreme level of creative control is what the band has always preferred. Shows often sell out because they choose to play smaller, more intimate venues. This connection directly to fans extends to The Rip Tide release itself, the desire to be able to 100% decide what their music will sound, look, and feel like, not to mention how it can be obtained.

Griffin Rodriguez’s production is, once again, immaculate. The performances of the band — Perrin Cloutier on accordion, Paul Collins on bass, Ben Lanz on trombone, Nick Petree on drums, and Kelly Pratt on horns — are spot-on. With contributions by such esteemed colleagues as violinist Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) and Sharon Van Etten, The Rip Tide reveals greater levels the more you explore. And you don’t even have to travel very far.