Andrew Bird Noble Beast Free
By Daniel Garrett Andrew Bird, Noble Beast Produced by Andrew Bird Recorded and Mixed by Mark Nevers Mastered by Jeff Lipton Fat Possum Records, 2009 The music of Andrew Bird, a singer and songwriter, has delicacy, detail, and depth: and it is not simply an expression of thought and emotion but an elaboration of perspective. Andrew Bird is an artist, one of significant mastery, one who seems able to reconcile sound and silence, wilderness and order, love and solitude. When we are very young, we think of adults as free, knowing, strong; and as we grow older and more aware we begin to understand how constrained and weak many adults are. For some of us, artists and thinkers become heroes, figures of agility and movement, of imagination, of knowledge and strength; although, it is true, many artists are free only in the realm of their own work: and they hold for us an image of the possible, if not the probable. Andrew Bird, who was born and bred in the Chicago area, liked a variety of music since he was a boy, including European classical music, blues, jazz, and music from other countries (Hungarian gypsy and south Indian music), hearing all music as connected. Andrew Bird, attracted to the violin when he was four, graduated from Northwestern University, where he focused on the violin, and he soon began producing music albums. His song collections include: Music of Hair, Thrills, Oh!
The Grandeur, The Swimming Hour, Fingerlings, The Ballad of the Red Shoes, Weather Systems, Fingerlings 2, Sovay, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Fingerlings 3, Armchair Apocrypha, Soldier On, and Live in Montreal. Bird, who owns a farm, has been able to make a decent living from his music since he was nineteen years old; and the gradual development of his career, from obscurity to fame, has been classic. (His fans have been known to discuss his lyrics and his socks.) Bird, for whom experimentation is a given, has said that he creates more out of happiness than pain; and, consequently, it is nice to conclude, in light of his productivity, that he is living a happy life.
It is interesting, then, that his music has a mellow, male melancholy, with songs that have complex structures and words that sound great on the tongue. Music is sound, sound given the attention of craft, sound infused with feeling and thought, dreams and guesses and suspicions, sound made to carry the wonder of the world. With Noble Beast, Andrew Bird has said that he wanted to make the music he heard in his head, sounds he was not hearing in the music world. The musicians who helped Andrew Bird make Noble Beast include Martin Dosh (percussion, keyboards, looping); Jeremy Ylvisaker (guitar, organ, shortwave); Mike Lewis (clarinet); David Lindvall (bass); Andreas Werliin (drums); and Emil Svanangen (flute). Of Bird’s Noble Beast, music critic Joan Anderman declared, “God knows Noble Beast is lovely: 14 slices of sublime chamber pop—ranging in scope from a 20-second trip (‘Ouo’) to a six-minute Latin meditation (‘Masterswarm’)—made of Bird’s conservatory-caliber violin, virtuosic whistle, picked guitar, and signature looping, the occasional flute, keyboard, and clarinet, and a smattering of delicate electronics” ( Boston Globe, January 19, 2009). Criticism is a translation of experience, observation, and judgment, a translation of sound into insight.
Critics have reviewed Andrew Bird’s work and have drawn attention to the quality of mind present in Bird’s work, and his interest in biology and history. Bird himself said he first conceived Noble Beast as akin to a nook in a forest, full of strange life. Billboard’s Katie Hasty observed that “if anything distinguishes Noble Beast from its predecessors, it is its seriousness.
From the super-simple ‘Tenuousness’ to the pensive instrumental intermissions ‘Ouo’ and ‘Unfolding Fans,’ there’s a constant spooky and dreamlike whir to all 14 songs” (January 31, 2009). In a thoughtful review that acknowledged that Bird’s appeal has been sometimes more intellectual than emotional, on the pages of the web review Drowned in Sound (March 12, 2009) James Skinner wrote, “Where Andrew Bird succeeds so fervently with Noble Beast is in endowing it a vital, quixotic sense of humanity.” Of course, while Andrew Bird’s whistling may be the most idiosyncratic thing about his music, a whistling that is both natural and odd, it is Bird’s voice that is likely to be the most engaging and memorable: he has command of different tonal approaches. That voice, embedded in songs intelligently and richly constructed, in which an increase in volume actually matches the lyrics and serves dramatic purpose, is a voice quite hard to resist. There can be no doubt why some people think of Noble Beast as a masterwork. “Oh No” begins with violin and whistling and continues with lines about being “arm and arm with all the homeless sociopaths” and admonitions to “get out of here, past the atmosphere.” The song was inspired by a child’s cry—“oh no”—heard by Bird during an airplane flight; and it provides the album’s first but not last elevation.
The composition “Masterswarm,” which seems to connect the world of wild nature and social life, could be a classical choir piece, though Bird’s voice becomes a croon in the second part of the song, which has a rhythm akin to light clapping, and rhymes such as “diction, eviction, conviction,” rhymes that both charm and distance. “Fitz and the Dizzyspells” has a layered texture and a fast, pleasing tempo.
The structural changes in “Effigy” are like the changes that occur in the human mind and in society, and the lyrics reflect on aloneness and fake social conversation (there is a violin introduction with what might be keyboards, then ballad singing and guitar and harmony vocals; suggesting isolation and company). The central character in “Tenuousness” seems unusually smart and alienated, and the music has a somewhat country-western rhythm with the strings of formally composed music (contrast and complement). There are lovely melody lines in “Nomenclature.” (Bird has said that melody is pure, while words are suspect.
Andrew Bird Noble Beast
A long hike through the folds in Andrew Bird's brain is what you sign up for when you play one of his albums. He's been wandering that path since 2003's Weather Systems, when he retired his former band, the Bowl of Fire, and moved to Western Illinois to live with his thoughts on an old farm. On his new album, Noble Beast, Bird can sometimes seem too far inside his own head.
And he also appears aware of it, addressing that solitude on 'Effigy': 'When one has spent too much time alone.' He doesn't answer with another lyric- perhaps he doesn't have an answer. Instead, he lets you fill in the blank while he reels off a pretty, rustic violin figure. Noble Beast is, in many ways, a record that asks you to forget the way you currently approach the album. It didn't click for me on early listens. 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.
Andrew Bird Noble Beast Torrent
Marinating in an album in this way is old-fashioned in the overloaded peer-to-peer era, but it's a fitting approach from Bird, a guy who often wrestles with the implications of modern technology and communications. 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.'
Andrew Bird Noble Beast Playlist
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. Despite early listens, I quickly found myself returning to the record even as I corresponded about it with some nonplussed colleagues. And it revealed itself to be fantastically detailed, from the woodwinds that spice the electronic pulse of 'Not a Robot, But a Ghost' to the bassline that comes out of nowhere at the finale of 'The Privateers'. More broadly, it takes you even further into the canyons of Bird's mind, and it does so with an organic, unhurried flow that's ultimately an improvement on 2007's Armchair Apochrypha, a record I felt was sometimes too fussy and mannered. Even the bonus disc that comes with the deluxe edition, Useless Creatures, has a captivating looseness that finally brings some of the high-wire energy of his unpredictable live shows into the studio. Noble Beast is has its weak spots- 'Nomenclature' in particular takes the repurposing of language purely for its sound a step too far, not least of which because Bird chose a cumbersome, ugly word- but one of the benefits of working so far in your own sphere is that your mistakes will always be interesting, and better than that, you get to learn from them.
I have no idea what Bird will learn from making this record, but he seems to have taught himself plenty about what his music can be during his time alone- and now he's reminding us about the value of patiently engaging with music as well.