Noble Beast - Andrew Bird

I resolved to really get to know this album on the long train rides I projected for myself travelling around France, and all the time I'd be moving around alone, between hostels and couchsurfers. As it turned out, I didn't really spend all that much time alone. Scheduled or not, somebody always showed up ready for a conversation in bad French. I don't know if that just shows how much the French like to talk about themselves, half the time I almost could tell they could tell they weren't being understood.

Still, one Sunday afternoon in Metz, and a lonely train ride to Paris were all it took for me to know that this would be one of those rare records I would look to for calm on any given sleepless, distracted night. The first song I grew to like on this is called Fitz and Dizzyspells, a really lovely, jaunty little tune complete with echoing vocal accompaniment, 'Soldier on! Oooh..' All that cheeriness went quite well with the rolling French countryside, usually in the fashion of rather modest hill ranges opening up into the valleys of Champagne resplendent with farmland and cottages.

Andrew Bird doesn't tone down much on his habit of lining up obscure, incomprehensible, and seemingly unrelated images and ideas one suspects he conceives of as wordplay. An example, from Tenuousness:

Tenuous at best was all he had to say when pressed about the rest of it,
the world that is
from proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans
Greek Cypriots and and Hobis-hots
Who hang around in ports a lot

... I know. Don't ask me.

Regardless, I don't feel like I have to understand the music to like it, especially when it is so obviously, and so exceptionally melodic. One thing about Noble Beast I really like is that Andrew Bird constantly resists the temptation to be lush and simply that. It's as if he's holding back on the wailing strings and horns just so he can take the time to make the most of the quiet and be intricate with his arrangements. And he does that quite with aplomb, never holding on to a phrase or melody past its wear, always introducing something unexpected into the mix. And whether that surprise comes from the the strange fingerpicking on his own violin to fill in a pause, an abrupt change in key or time signature, random whistling, or a reference to 'a wolf with a lung disease', the music as a whole always retains a coherence that makes it unmistakably Andrew Bird.

About the only straightforward track on the album, in terms of song structure, and melody and such is one called The Privateers, which I have grown to quite like anyway. Overall it's not hard to dismiss Noble Beast as boring, and slow, perhaps unadventurous. But it's still quality songwriting, that makes the effort to stand out in between the bars, instead of making grand sonic statements with a view to push pop music in this or that direction. Andrew Bird still defies classification. He is neither folk nor country nor chamber pop nor new-age in any significant way, he is not obviously a torch-bearer of some lost generation of rock music, nor does he have a league of contemporaries to be applied to and judged against. Which is maybe why critics can't make much of him beyond the isolated positive review.

Which doesn't affect me in the least. I remember clearly walking down La Moselle in Metz trying to hum the melody line to Natural Disaster and failing because I couldn't grasp the changes in key. And after I'd sat down on a park bench and listened to the track it seemed to go quite naturally, but once I tried to hum it on my own again the fact that I didn't detect a change in key was once again obvious. It might be little things, but it's those little adjustments and details that go their way to making him sound so damn good. I really can't wait to see him live.