Noble Beast

It's less mopey than Bright Eyes, less pompous than Sufjan Stevens and better than almost everything else. [Feb 2009, p.103]

With Noble Beast, Bird proves that he's a whistling Renaissance man for modern times.

With its cuteness and shimmying pace, the opener 'Oh No' gets your seat in the chair, while the other tracks keep you there.

Some songs are all middle, stuck on what might be mere bridges by, say, Rufus Wainwright or Paul Simon. Yet Bird’s open-field poetics do let a wider world creep in, from the corruption of ecosystems to the isolation that can afflict a touring musician or a declining leader alike.

The man's wordsmithing is even headier than his beautiful songs.

Noble Beast overcomplicates what should be a simpler formula; the meat is in Bird’s performances, the virtuoso skills at his disposal, not the antiseptic display of distorted guitar tones that the album’s best song unfortunately resorts to in its final section.

Bird is in full control and evokes his The Swimming Hour and everyone’s favorite, Mysterious Production of Eggs, days; those days where he did everything on his own. All of the aforementioned allows him to present one of his best albums to date.

Where Andrew Bird succeeds so fervently with Noble Beast is in endowing it a vital, quixotic sense of humanity.

It has a warm, uncertain humanity that its predecessors, for all their depth and beauty, did not: it scans as genuine, music made from necessity rather than from the impulse of an extraordinary showman.

Noble Beast veers off into a cheerily nonspecific world of jangly guitars and meandering melodies that evoke everyone from Okkervil River to Radiohead without ever making an impact of their own.

Whatever the sound, his songs are unfailingly catchy, and his smart lyrics and lovely melodies make them stand out even when they're understated.

Beast is his most instantly inviting album by far and vividly underscores his skills as a producer.

It may lack the wrong-footing eclecticism that made his name, but makes up for that in pure melodic charm. [Mar 2009, p.109]

There certainly isn't a lack of beautifully crafted, well produced music on this release, but if you're looking for a full plate of pop-inspired power ballads, stick to the last two discs.

There are some sweet la-la-la bits and a bit of cheery whistling, but nothing jarring or abrasive which might prevent listeners from lapsing into a deep sleep by the sixth track.

Poetry has always been another tool in his box, but here more than ever, it seems that the lyrics serve as an instrument, not to be separated from the rest of the music, and helping to create a seamless but showy overall sound.

The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place.

Bird probably could have stood to cull a few of the weaker numbers, and with the additional room, might have reworked a few of the selections from Useless Creatures into experimental pop songs, thereby tempering his lack of risk taking on Noble Beast.

He's never been quite so on top of his game or quite so blessed with melodic magic. [Mar 2009, p.100]

Here, he takes another leap, fusing Armchair's emotive indie rock with the chamber-music experimentalism of his early recordings.

Similar to witnessing Bird's high-wire concert act, in which he deftly loops figures from guitar, violin, and vocals to create living sound colleges of pop songs, one comes away from Noble Beast feeling more impressed than moved.

With his SAT-acing vocabulary, Bird still rocks some of the best rhymes in the game, cobbling together his own foreign language from arcane terms.

With Noble Beast, time stands still for a brief moment until a song eventually hits a certain plateau, but sometimes that plateau can be too distant.

About a third of Noble Beast coasts along like this, generating an amiable atmosphere while advancing the album's contemplations of evolution and the loss of self. But then Bird arrives at a song like 'Fitz And The Dizzyspells', or 'Anonanimal', and suddenly Noble Beast turns into a higher form of pop music, so beautifully, horrifyingly evolved.

Bird and his 10 collaborators use sound the way the impressionists daubed paint, layering elegiac violin melodies with pattering plucked notes, fuzzy or jangly guitar, clip-clop percussion, clicks and drones to create music that might be straightforwardly folky, brightly poppy or more experimental, but is always vivid and engaging.

Although it’s undoubtedly consistent and enjoyable, these are the kind of adjectives that restrain this established songwriter from truly challenging or surprising his audience.

There’s a sense throughout that Bird’s head is engaged in a battle with his heart, as if aware that there’s a pop masterpiece squatting on the far horizons of his intuition.