Andrew Bird
Noble Beast
Fat Possum, 2009
By Peter Gorman
Andrew Bird’s favourite snack food — according to a recent interview with Bob Boilen on NPR’s All Songs Considered — is olives. Now, olives, you see (bear with me here) are something of a solitary variety of snack food. One might, say, shoot the shit with friends — beer flowing, voices lifting — over a plate of nachos; or, upon emerging reluctantly from the tent to meet the cold dawn of the last day of hiking, huddle with mates about the final Ziploc of gorp; or maybe stay in with a sweetheart and a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s by the blue light of a movie. Olives, on the other hand, demand solitude. A plate of olives, crackers, feta, a glass of riesling, and some obscure historical tome: surely this must be how Andrew Bird unwinds after a hard day’s work, no?
The only appearance olives make in a Bird song occurs in “Dora Goes to Town,” from his 1998 Bowl of Fire record, Oh! The Grandeur, wherein the titular character “puts eggs in her orange juice, coffee in her tea / Puts olives in her jelly, says that’s the way it’s gonna be / Ashes and mashes and dust and mustard / Creamed spinach sandwich and she cuts the crusts off.” See how she, with much free time on her hands, gleefully mis-combines these various foodstuffs and insists (to no one but herself!) “that’s the way it’s gonna be”? Olives are the favoured snack food of somebody like Dora, of someone (to borrow a line from Noble Beast’s gorgeous “Effigy”) “who’s spent a little too much time alone”.
Andrew Bird obviously spends a great deal of time alone. Only someone with so much time to themselves — and therefore permitted to let his mind wander from scientific musings to ancient civilizations, childhood memories to existential arithmetic, and to meticulously hollow out a perfect melody (or ten!) with his soft, perfect whistling —could write the kind of songs that Bird does. Occasionally, however, the product of such, ahem, alone-time can start to collapse ‘neath its own weight.
Take, for instance, the opening verse from Noble Beast’s (self-referentially-titled?) fifth track, “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 harbor sorts who hang around in ports a lot.” Catch all that? Note especially, “proto-Sanskrit” to “Porto-centric” to “harbor sorts who hang around in ports a lot.” See, it’s a joke: Porto is a city in Portugal and, oddly enough, it’s a port city and, if “porto-centric” were actually a word, one could hazard a guess that it would mean “one who hangs around in ports a lot” and also Lisbon (where Lisboans are from) is a port city in Portugal and…
Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly ha ha funny, but it’s undeniably and impossibly clever — if you happened to spot it for the fleeting moment in which that particular mouthful sped by, that is. And therein lies my lone quibble with the music of Noble Beast: it’s a thousand brilliant punchlines crammed into three-and-a-half minutes of stagetime. As Cokemachineglow’s Eric Sams noted in his most astute review of Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha, “It is as if he was served a concise statement of the rules of pop, perused it thoroughly, and decided while politely handing it back that he wasn’t interested in pursuing that particular course.” Bird wants to have his three-and-a-half minute pop song and eat it too. In Bird’s case, such a course often yields dazzling results. Nevertheless, the truth is that, under such formal contraints, one can only cram in so much ancient history, existentialist reckonings, popular science, post-structural écriture, dizzying wordplay, syllables, etc. before things start to burst a little at the seams.
It should come as no surprise, then, that it is collaboration, expressly with Minneappolis multi-instrumentalist Martin Dosh, that produces some of Bird’s finest moments. In particular, “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” — propelled by Dosh’s yardsale percussion and ferocious drumming — is, indeed, everything it’s cracked up to be, delivering on the immense promise of last year’s Soldier On EP standout “The Trees were Mistaken”. While it’s underscored, both musically and lyrically, by a paranoia not unlike that befitting a Thom Yorke tune, it still undoubtedly carries a heartbeat (y’know, that thing humans do, to remind themselves they’re alive?… sorry, Thom).
With my word-count creeping ever-northwards, at this point I feel the need to flail my arms desperately about, proclaiming that this is, nevertheless, a fantastic record. (Furthermore, the bonus disc of instrumental experimentation, though it reveals itself slowly, demands repeated listens — headphones listens; as Bird is known to retool tracks for inclusion on later albums, one can only imagine in what form some of these melodies might pop up next.)
Anyway, sure, it can be a thin line between brilliance and self-indulgence — but Andrew Bird, with few exceptions, tends to stay on the right side of it. Admittedly, Noble Beast may not temper some of its excesses as well as previous albums, but it still displays the complex and sophisticated machinations of Bird’s relentlessly imaginative mind turning as ever before.
I enjoyed this immensely. I saw Bird w/ Calexico 6/19 at the BoA Pavilion in Boston and it was amazing. Thanks so much for posting your thoughts; great fun.