Beirut, "The Rip Tide"

It’s Friday, and still so hot that all I want to do for the rest of the day is drink seltzer water and watch this new Beirut video over and over and over again. It’s directed by Houmam Abdallah and Beirut’s Zach Condon says it has “brought the song somewhere that I had only been able to describe to myself, now available for others to see and feel it much more as I had in the process of writing it.” That’s about the nicest thing a musical artist could say about a video for one of his songs, isn’t it? But I wonder whether they had to fill that sailboat with, like, 500 pounds of dead killies to get those seagulls to flock around it for the shoot. That must have stunk. Seagulls are obviously still thriving due to global warming.