Andrew Bird

A read through of Noble Beast's lyric sheet isn't only intimidating, it's damn near impenetrable. A listen to the music, though, and there's no hint of the bookish opacity that the lyrics would suggest. Instead, Bird is remarkably adept at creating wistful soundscapes with breezy melodies to match. Handclaps, violin and Bird's trademark whistling all make Noble Beast feel rather warm and inviting.

It's easy enough to pick out individual elements that make up the whole of Noble Beast: the elements of Spanish influence ("Effigy," "Masterswarm"), the joyous indie-rock ("Fitz & Dizzyspells") and the melancholy folk-pop ("Nomenclature"). When everything appears at once, though, and when all the different pieces seems to endlessly compliment each other, it’s much more difficult to place the album as a whole. Noble Beast is as unique an album as I've heard, but it's never frustrating.

Andrew Bird is like that perfect type of friend who's a little bit smarter than you but doesn't flaunt it, nor does he dumb himself down to fit in. His wit is effortless, and it makes listening effortless as well.

—Nathan Atnikov
01.16.08

Released in 2007, Armchair Apocrypha proved that hyper-literate singer/songwriter, genre-bending violin player, and peerless whistler Andrew Bird had found the perfect middle ground between his increasingly austere solo sets and the full-band grandeur of his days with the Bowl of Fire, a strategy he repeats with similar results on Noble Beast, his fifth full-length solo offering and second collection for the Mississippi-based Fat Possum label. Bird, a classically trained violinist since the age of four, has skillfully integrated nearly everything with strings on it into his repertoire since his conversion from the Weill and Brecht-heavy days of Music of Hair, Thrills, and Oh! The Grandeur to the semi-mainstream indie pop of The Swimming Hour, but it's his seemingly limitless capacity for manipulation of the violin that dominates Noble Beast. Opening cut "Oh No," a track that Bird began releasing sketches of months before the album's street date, may be his most successful foray into the murky world of the potentially commercial pop song yet, boasting a chorus that points directly at the Shins while maintaining the artistic integrity of the loop-happy, meticulous craftsman who fans have been watching evolve since 2003's Weather Systems. What follows is a typically eclectic batch of material that reflect Bird's own musical time line. Tracks like "Masterswarm" and "Not a Robot, But a Ghost" are proof positive that he hasn't completely abandoned his swing jazz roots, "Fitz and the Dizzyspells" could very well provide audiences with their first opportunity to "bust a move" at a show, while "Nomenclature"'s easy country-folk front half dissolves into a rear end that wouldn't seem out of place on a late-'90s Radiohead album. Throughout it all Bird rhymes -- sometimes to a fault -- like a history or biology professor ("From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans"), rendering many of the songs clever as opposed to emotionally resonant, but whatever romance he lacks in the textual medium he more than makes up for in melody. [The deluxe version of the album includes an impressive bonus disc of instrumental works, cleverly titled Useless Creatures, which features collaborations with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and jazz bassist Todd Sickafoose.] ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide