During his previous releases, Beirut’s Zach Condon came across like some sort of musical Relic Hunter, intent on museum-ing everything from the Balkan folk heard on 2006‘s Gulag Orkestar to the French chanson of 2007’s The Flying Club Cup or Mexican brass of 2009’s March Of The Zapotech EP. If he wasn’t singing about spending nights with prostitutes from Marseille or sending postcards from Italy, he was titling his songs ‘Bratislava’, ‘Nantes’, ‘Venice’ or ‘The Rhineland.’ Even the album’s artwork featured sepia-tinged photographs- no doubt lifted from the archives of some outlying Post-War image collection.

The music was great, for sure- but it did all just feel that little bit impersonal; especially coming from a bedroom-stewing American youngster with stage fright.

If Zach ‘not being his own man’ was a problem for Beirut though, it seems ’The Rip Tide’ has emphatically addressed it.

Source: God Is In The TV Zine (http://s.tt/12XXV)