[size=+1]Andrew Bird
Noble Beast
Jan. 2009[/size]
On one of musician Andrew Bird's most successful albums, The Swimming Hour, accredited to Bird and his Bowl of Fire, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist asks the listener not to “make me choose between rhyme or reason.” On his fourth full length solo album Bird has clearly made a decision. For better or for worse, his nimble mind crafts intricate rhyming schemes and clever wordplay that would fail if not for his equally nimble tongue. On album highlight “Anonanimal” Bird mumbles “I see a sea anemone/The enemy/See a sea anemone/And that'll be the end of me” over an intricately layered bed of plucked violin strings and acoustic guitar strums. The rest of the opening section doesn't make any more sense than that opening stanza (though, ultimately, the song seems to be about how we adapt to various situations), but it doesn't even matter anymore. On “Anonanimal,” at least, Bird has transcended the need for his words to have meaning, the power of his voice and the beauty of the loop behind him, supplemented by Martin Dosh's drumming, speak for him.
In a similar, but drastically less successful vein, “Tenuousness” takes pieces of some of Bird's best songs from past albums and exaggerates them to almost comical proportions. “Scythian Empires” was one of Armchair Apocrypha's strongest tracks, but while the historical name dropping felt natural and meaningful in that track, here Bird's references to “proto-Sanskrit Minoans,” “porto-centric Lisboans,” “Greek Cypriots,” and “Hobis-hots” feels forced and overly precious. Likewise, the chorus to the track cribs from The Mysterious Production of Eggs' excellent “Masterfade” with “Ten, you, us, ness, less, seven comes to three. Them, you, us, plus eleven, thank the heavens, for their elasticity.” These lines match the internal rhythm of the music, but if you are looking for deep meaning here you are not going to find it.
That is not to say that the album is devoid of meaning. On the contrary, other album highlights like “Natural Disaster” and “The Privateers” form a powerful one-two punch about all the tiny little 'natural disasters' that occur every day like decaying matter under our feet or just “a wolf with a lung disease” followed by a track that triumphantly asks the listener to “make this basic inference and speak of me in the present tense.” While the emotional impact of this album is lacking when compared to such previous Bird tracks as "Why?", "Armchairs," and "Tables and Chairs" the album finds that it doesn't so much need to be an 'important' statement about the many intricacies of life, and that is one of its good sides.
Musically, this album is bigger and “fuller” than Bird's other solo efforts. In ways, it is also more ambitious. Tracks like “Anonanimal” and “Souverian” contain multiple 'movements' within the same song. On “Not a Robot, But a Ghost,” Bird takes another song by collaborator Martin Dosh and reworks it into his own as on Apocrypha's “Simple X.” Elsewhere Bird simply cleans up and expands what he has been doing for years now as seen on lead single “Oh No.” The ingredients that make up an 'Andrew Bird song' are all there just a little shinier and a little more piled on than usual. His own unique brand of chamber pop lives on in this album perhaps best seen in the, relatively, sparse “Effigy.” Opening with a loop of violin plucks and bows, it segues perfectly into a simple acoustic guitar accompanied by Bird's vocals singing about being burned in effigy before introducing Bird's violin in the bridge.
Ultimately, this is a good, even great album. The word is that this is to be Andrew Bird's breakthrough album, and you can tell. Everything has that shine to it that is just begging to be loved, especially in the first, and weakest, half. Indeed, this album is very bottom-heavy with the notable exception of “Effigy.” While the first half has good, catchy, enjoyable pop songs in “Oh No” and “Fitz and Dizzyspells,” it contains the records only real stumbles in the overly precious “Tenuousness” and the just boring “Nomenclature.” The album really hits its stride at “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” and contains at a remarkably strong clip through the final notes of “Souverian.” This is not Andrew Bird's best solo effort, but it is one of his strongest records to date. If this is the kind of music that is going to be released on the mainstream (or, at least, the Sunday New York Times reading populace), then the mainstream has hope.
