Andrew Bird

Noble Beast (Fat Possum)

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: January 15th, 2009 | 9:00am

It’s the whistling that makes one happy. Andrew Bird is a fine whistler, and those puckered lips kiss Bird’s latest album, Noble Beast, again and again. How can you frown while whistling? It’s a near impossibility, and you can’t hear someone whistle infectious little melodies without smiling a little. And smile you will as Bird, a Chicago singer-songwriter adept at violin (thanks to training at Northwestern), makes his most unified and solid album to date.

While his critically acclaimed Armchair Apocrypha (2007) was a sprawling, ambitiously eclectic catch-all of words, thoughts, arrangements, and instrumentations, Noble Beast is refined — simple, direct, and unified. This isn’t to say it’s bland or boring, each song sounding like the one before it. It’s just that Bird is determined to mature as an artist, to reign himself in, to put himself in a box and see how he can color it. It’s a rainbow.

Put out by Fat Possum (Armchair was their first effort together, while his well-known Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production Of Eggs was put out by Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe imprint), Noble Beast is distinctly Bird. That is, folk music with some orchestral/gypsy/rock/indie pop touches to it — all wrapped around Bird’s one-of-a-kind lyrics.

The 35-year-old doesn’t write a song about a breakup like many would, the “I sit alone now that you’re long gone”–type lyrics. No, in “Not a Robot, But a Ghost,” he sings, “I hear the clockwork in your core / Time strips the gears till you forget what they were for / I push the numbers through your pores / I crack the codes / I crack the codes that end the war.” “Masterswarm,” a six-minute-plus affair, begins like a 16th century troubadour’s song — a voice, the pluck of strings — before breaking into a flamenco-like tune with a tap of the foot, a clap, a rhythm that’ll move your hips, “Flailing fetal fleas / Feeding from the arms of the master / Burrow into me / And this is sure to misspell disaster.” “Tenuousness” is a plucky tune in which one envisions a boxcar fella playing his guitar: the door swung open, a pelt of green verdant valley grass laid out before the tracks as far as he can see. He’s a happy guy, knowing his belly will be filled at the next stop. All of these songs are rich with lyrical magic.

Will Andrew Bird, this inventive esoteric fellow with the odd lyrics and violin upon his shoulder, make it in the wide world of music? If Noble Beast is any indication of his direction, perhaps. Will he want to make it that big? Playing in front of thousands? Let him whistle while he works, and that’s what’ll happen.

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