Noble Beast
The sound of the album is as important as the notes Bird plays, and this extends to the lyrics, where he's gradually gone from word-play to syllable-play, often choosing lines for their sounds and tonal quality more than for their meaning. Nevertheless, Bird's music is still emotionally powerful-- he gives uncommon weight to odd phrases, sometimes backing off pronouncing a word fully. His diction comes and goes similar to the way Thom Yorke's does. Some of the phrases don't mean anything; others jump out oddly, like the way he follows a free-association game on "Masterswarm" with the startlingly cogent, even harrowing line, "They took me to the hospital and they put me through a scan." Bird injects the music with similar contrasts, opening "Effigy" with a spooky bed of looping, processed violins before shifting into one of the album's most traditional-sounding moments, with finger-picked acoustic guitar playing a simple, straightforward melody. -Joe Tangari Pitchfork.com 7.5/10
A detailed, patient grower in an era of overstuffed instant pleasures, the sound and tonal quality on Andrew Bird's latest album is often as important as the notes he plays or the words he sings.
Some musicians wait until just the right moment in a song to let loose with their telltale big wail, or to rip into a fiery guitar solo. With Andrew Bird, it's all about the whistling. In "Masterswarm," the second song on his fine new Noble Beast, Bird starts slow, moaning over some simple guitar-plucking before…
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.
<p>Bird creates an alternative vision of the universe as seductive as it is strange</p>