i guess i'm floating | reviews: April 2007

On his third and most impressive solo album, Andrew Bird takes a leap into new territory while retaining what makes him so damn appealing in the first place. - by Connor McGlynn

I would like to express my love and admiration for the work of Andrew Bird. There was a time in 2005 between February 8th, the day Bird's The Mysterious Production Of Eggs was released into the collective indie eardrum, and March 22nd (the day Bloc Party debuted Silent Alarm), when I fell victim to his craft. It was my first exposure to his music, and songs like "Measuring Cups" and "Fake Palindromes" instantly opened my eyes to his unique musical and lyrical style. Each song on Eggs played with the tiny hairs on my cochlea covering a whole spectrum of intensity, from the lovely, swaying "Sovay" to the alarming and mysterious "Banking On A Myth."

For many, this album was Bird's best work, one that solidified a genre that he certainly made his own. After a two-year span of touring and recording, Bird returned with an album so blindingly close to perfection and deeply rooted in change that it left some reviewers gasping for breath and yet puzzled others. His lyrics retain their usual wittiness and humor ("And the wine made our mouths too loose / such a reckless choice of words / when you tell me that I'm too abstruse / I just thought it was a kind of bird") while his music may have succumbed to the greatest amount of evolution we've seen from him yet.

On "Dark Matter," Bird begins by demonstrating his remarkable whistling and progresses the song much like the way he constructs his live performances, piling on layer upon layer of violin plucking, progressive drumming, and loose guitars. On one of the album's many highlights, "Simple X," Bird showcases one of his catchiest tunes yet as drummer and long-time friend Martin Dosh beat-battles with a drum machine. It's hard not to recall a bit of Beck on this track (think Odelay's shifting beats and Sea Change's narcotic subtleties, with obvious vocal similarities).

Bird faithfuls generally seem to be on the lamb about Armchair Apocrypha. Some mistake Bird's inventive and dextrous lyrics for those of meaningless abstraction and abstrusity (see the lyric above for Bird's response), while others seem to feel that the album as a whole lacks the ingenuity and substance that his previous releases almost relentlessly display. It's without a doubt that Armchair is his most accessible release (that's not to say his others are inaccessible), but don't let yourself get caught up in cliché: just because an artist is creating undeniably appealing songs doesn't mean the artist has gone for the $green$ and abandoned his base.

Armchair Apocrypha is Andrew Bird's strongest release to date and if current vibes don't float that way, they most likely will as his career expands in the upcoming years. It's likely his future musical endeavors will see just as much progression but for an artist whose last two solo albums soared over similar plains, Armchair marks this Bird's flight into new territory while continuing to illustrate his strength as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and yes... as a whistler too.