Beirut keeps Euro flair, adds American pop feel

Escapism is an idea often found in music, but the listener can’t always pick out an artist’s inspiration. Beirut

The Rip Tide

Pompeii Records

Grade: A

Rocks Like: Bon Iver’s European cousin

Escapism is an idea often found in music, but the listener can’t always pick out an artist’s inspiration.

Zach Condon’s obvious harkening to the nostalgia of the Balkans and Eastern Europe in his first album, The Gulag Orkestar, and then to the bustling street life of France in The Flying Club Cup reflected a willingness to combine the lilting themes of world music with more familiar Western chords.

The Rip Tide, the third product of Condon’s expansion into a band as Beirut, shifts the tone to traditional American pop — crisp, appealing and subdued — while keeping the Euro-influenced instrumentation and feel.

By creating a flowing, nine-track composition, Condon does not impose the cacophony of his prior works upon his audience, but instead allows his crooning to lull and soothe.

The Santa Fe native employs minimalistic melancholia, evident in the three chorus repetitions of the song “East Harlem,” which opens with “Another rose wilts in East Harlem / 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.” He uses uplifting acoustics, deliberately avoiding the electronic experimentation of his contemporaries Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens.

Despite being youthful and lo-fi, the songs “Goshen” and “Santa Fe” maintain a newfound elegance in the still-maturing Condon, who stretches his subject matter from a deceased soldier to fleeting love.

The warmth of a more experienced voice, feel and message ultimately allows for “easy listening” and a growing audience.