Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird is as operatic as ever on Noble Beast, his fifth studio album, bringing his violin, whistling, looped percussion and acoustic guitar into beautiful assemblage. "Flitz & Dizzyspells" is a rollicking, jolting piece, and "Effigy" draws on a number of European folk traditions. And he wraps his mellifluous voice around his trademark fine, fine rhymes constructed with post-grad vocab and arcane textbook terminology.

Most of the Chicago musician's songs are more exercises in mood and ambience, and are less concerned with traditional song structure and melodic progression than they are with establishing a lived-in space; at this, he excels. An accomplished arranger, Bird places tremulous aural effects among moaning bowed strings and precisely plucked ones. Nothing's out of place, not a handclap, bell or twinkly flourish. Everything's intended, and that overarching vision for an album can be comforting for a listener (though on the flipside, that precision can occasionally come across a little cold). If Noble Beast has any flaw, it's that its running time, just shy of one hour, still feels a bit of a drag. Since the album's more laconic that past Bird releases, that hour comes across as drawn out unnecessarily, particularly since in that hour Bird crams double that time's worth of ideas. Granted, of the 14 tracks, a few are brief sound collages, but still. Too much of a good thing's no huge problem to have with a thing of such gorgeousness.

As a side note, the album's available also as a deluxe edition packaged with an additional instrumental CD. Useless Creatures is no mere add-on, though; it's as interesting as anything on Noble Beasts. The deluxe edition also has a fold-out poster, an illustrated lyric book, new photos and different cover art. Nifty.

—Chris Hassiotis
03.01.09

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