Best of 2009: 19

19. Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
Nature’s rubbish isn’t it? It gets all over you, it’s hard to wash off, it’s seemingly 90% composed of shit, it flies up your sinuses, it drops into your drink, it falls from trees with nary a care for who’s supposed to clean it up, it seems to have a irrational phobia of noxious industrial fumes, it grows where you don’t need nor want it and meekly withers and dies when you attempt to meet it half way and encourage it. Chicago multi-instrumentalist (one of those words which are only ever encountered written down, and with good reason) Andrew Bird may not completely agree with this, his fourth solo album is as bucolic as the chewed end of a piece of straw, a sumptuously organic piece of work that evocates the natural world with no little flair. It’s an extraordinarily detailed album, so incredibly layered with violin, clacking percussion, double basses, flutes and dozens more instruments that even nearly twelve months after its release every listen seems to uncover some new device to ignite your attention. This meticulous approach to music making extends to Bird’s lyrics, with words mainly chosen for their sounds and tonal qualities rather than any actual meaning (although dropping lines like ‘The young in the larva stage orchestrating plays/ In vestments of translucent alabaster’ into day-to-day conversation is a great ice-breaker).
If that sounds a little pretentious, then you haven’t heard the half of it. Andrew Bird’s main failing is that he can occasionally lose track of himself in attempting to impress the listener, very occasionally the songs can briefly tumble over the fine line separating ‘very good’ with merely ‘very impressive’. And you can practically see the grin on his face as he contemplates how he got away with opening an album with the line ‘In the salsify mains of what was thought but unsaid/ All the calcified arithmetists were doing the math’. One of the songs is called Nomenclature for Christ’s sake…
However, it seems extremely churlish to bemoan a brilliantly smart and gifted musician just for being aware that he is a brilliantly smart and gifted musician. With Noble Beast Andrew Bird has pulled off the difficult trick of creating a record that is on one hand endlessly inventive and experimental while on the other hand remaining faithful to some of the oldest forms of music known to man, it’s an album that has it’s eyes firmly on the future while and the same time never losing sight of its past. His best album; and I say that with the authority of someone who’s never heard any of the others. A fine whistler too…