Eight albums into his career, it’s probably no surprise that Andrew Bird has settled into his sound. If you’ve heard anything he’s done in the last five or six years, you ought to know what to expect: the whistling and looping violin underlie Bird’s relaxed Midwestern voice as he eases Roget-required word games out of his mouth. Noble Beast has it all. Though not as upbeat as his last, Armchair Apocrypha, nor as focused (or as flawless) as 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Noble Beast is still a wonderful album.
Bird’s albums reward repeated plays. I’ve had the same getting-to-know-you period for three albums running—on the first few listens they feel impossibly long. The first two or three times through Noble Beast, I consistently looked at the track list around the time of “Tenuousness,” expecting to find I was near the end of the record. “Tenuousness” is track five of fourteen. The first time my brilliant wife listened to it, I watched her do the exact same thing on the exact same song.
That feeling went away; I was familiar enough with Bird to know it would. The many melodies clarify themselves; the complicated lyrics, which at first sound like equal parts foreign language, tongue-twister, and textbook jargon, soon become intelligible, even fun. The album comes into focus—though not as focused as Bird’s last two records. Noble Beast is a more relaxed, more inward-looking affair. For better and for worse the album sounds like it was made by a man who has listened to no one but himself for the last few years. This is best illustrated by the second track, “Masterswarm,” one of three six-minute-plus tracks sprinkled across the album. Sandwiched between the breezy opener “Oh No” and the ready-for-its-close-up “Fitz and the Dizzyspells,” each of which recall Armchair Apocrypha’s exuberant first half, “Masterswarm” is a near-linear assemblage of movements—a preamble, a verse, a bridge, a violin interlude, another verse, a whistle solo, an outro. It’s a song you can lose yourself in, but it also drags the first half of the album down to a pace that the effervescent “Fitz” can’t overcome.
Bird fares better with his other epics, the outstanding “Anonanimal” and aching album-closer “Souverian,” each of which similarly glide from movement to movement but feel to be drawn with harder edges. “Anonanimal” is like the whole of Noble Beast writ small: a puzzle-like musical arrangement and a mazelike lyrical compendium of tongue-twisters (e.g., “See a sea anemone / the enemy / see a sea anemone / that’ll be the end of me / that’ll be the end of me”). It meanders musically as much if not more so than “Masterswarm,” but where that song is a patchwork of near-misses, this is a series of bull’s eyes.
“Masterswarm” isn’t the only drag on the record. “Not a Robot, But a Ghost,” placed in the center of the album right between two mini-instrumentals, is probably intended to lift the album out of a string of relaxed acoustic numbers. In fact, it has the reverse effect: I’d rather hear more like “Nomenclature,” “Tenuousness,” and the gorgeous "Privateer," all throwbacks to Mysterious Production-era Bird. Instead we have a track that, like “Simple X” from Armchair Apocrypha, features Bird collaborating with electonica artist Dosh. The beats just don't suit Bird as well as when he is the sole maestro. His songs work best when they center on his complex violin arrangements and language gumbo.
About that language gumbo: Bird's wordplay has long been a part of what makes his songs so enjoyable. The same is true on this album, though the flash and dazzle of his words and their sounds seem to trump meaning more often than before. I don’t really mind that. “Tenuousness” is the song most other reviews have pointed to as the best example of Noble Beast's pleasures—or annoyances, depending on your perspective. The line about “proto-Sanskrit Minoans or porto-centric Lisboans” makes either point. Really the whole album is chock-full of such wordplay. Bird seems equally fascinated by the idea that the sound of a word lends itself toward its definition just as the sequence of certain notes in a melody signify definitive emotions. His songs take on a larger meaning even if you’re unsure of what he’s really saying. Some might find Bird’s acrobatic wordplay pretentious or overwrought, but I find it fascinating, the way he’s able to eke meaning out of invented words or strange combinations of the scientific and mundane. “Nomenclature is washing away,” he sings in one song. It could be the theme of the record. His songs are a maze of language: parsing each line could as easily lead to a dead end as to an epiphany, but most often it is the pleasure of mouthing the words in song that is the thing. If in some songs there is no real meaning, there is an approximation of meaning. It’s the approximation that seems to be the point.
- Andrew Bird: Tenuousness
I'm right there with you on the word gumbo. I've always found Andrew Bird's wordplay to be quite endearing. Something about the way he seems to favor the feel of the words rather than their meaning. It reminds me of how attractive and exciting a new subject matter can feel; learning and synthesizing new terminology, melding it with the vocabulary of your everyday life.
Posted by: dan | August 03, 2010 at 03:17 PM