Bird has spent the last 15 years crafting an inimitable musical style by cobbling together pieces from various musical traditions, and indeed, all three of these songs are immediately recognizable as his creations. Take, for example, the album’s opening suite: “Oh No”, “Masterswarm”, and “Fitz & Dizzyspells”. As it turns out, most of the songs that make up Noble Beast fall into the latter category, making it the most uneven album in Bird’s solo catalog by a wide margin. However, on the songs where it doesn’t quite work the results are mixed songs meander in search of an ending, melodies float in the air but never quite come into focus. On the songs where this approach works, namely “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” and “Anonanimal”, the results are stunning - complex songs that sound organic, rather than fussed over. Bird is a notoriously meticulous songwriter and composer (allegedly, he scrapped The Mysterious Production of Eggs twice before committing to tape a version that he liked), and on Noble Beast he makes an obvious attempt to confront those impulses. Unfortunately, this approach cuts both ways. On Noble Beast, you hear the sound of the maestro at his most relaxed, as he loosens his grip on the reins, allowing melodies to blossom at their own pace. In their place you’ll find breezy melodies, acoustic instrumentation, and songs that easily stretch out to six or seven minutes in length. Gone are the sonically generous compositions, as well as much of the apocalyptic subject matter and black humor of that record. If Armchair Apocrypha was Bird’s reaction against his previous albums’ string-heavy bent, then his latest full-length, Noble Beast, in turn serves as a reaction against Armchair Apocrypha. The end result was a densely layered record full of grandiose, complex melodies, memorable hooks, and clever couplets. This also allowed Bird to use a more varied pallet, bringing in more electric guitar, electronics, and keys than he had used in the past. That’s not to say that there was little violin on the album, but rather that Bird’s virtuosic playing was showcased somewhat conservatively, thereby increasing its impact. In retrospect, then, it should be equally unsurprising that on Armchair Apocrypha, Bird’s 2007 full-length, the violin often took a back seat to other instruments.

In the 30 or so years since then, however, he’s managed to become proficient at playing a number of other instruments - the guitar, the mandolin, the glockenspiel - and has even mastered both the use of his own voice and the sound of his whistle. That’s not surprising when you consider the fact that Bird first picked up a violin at the age of four. The violin has always played a central role in Andrew Bird’s music.

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