What do you get when you make the same album three times in a row? Subquestion: Is it still awesome? The first answer is Andrew Bird's "Noble Beast," and the second: sorta.
In the grand scheme of pop music, the average listener is subjected to the same song over and over again. We are fed the same chord progressions from the same instruments that accompany lyrics about the same thing. Andrew Bird is a welcome departure from the monotony of pop listening.
Though he appears to be a mature step in the right direction for pop music, Andrew Bird is a conundrum. He is a violin-toting, pedal-looping whistler who teams up with electronic musicians to create folk songs. His subject matter and lyrics are esoteric and often pretentious, but his melodies are too inviting for the listener to feel stupid about not knowing what they're singing. Even with all of his pop formula-busting quirks, Andrew Bird has achieved a level of success analogous to rock stardom. He truly is the only musician who fearlessly does his own thing, and his unique musical identity is what makes him spectacular.
"Noble Beast" is, for all intents and purposes, a winner. It is a masterfully crafted and beautiful sounding piece of work. Each song is trademark Bird: the whistling, the layered and looped violin, the precise pizzicato, and the tight and danceable rhythms of drummer Martin Dosh. It all works too. There is no bad song on the album and no egregiously unsingable melodies. Even the rapid-fire lyrics of "Anonanimal" elicit a vocal response from the listeners. The album has all the makings of a good Bird album but somewhere along the way, "Noble Beast" falls a bit flat. And after seeing Bird live at Pickard Theater, I am beginning to believe that there a few limitations to Bird's sound.
"Noble Beast" is not particularly different from any of his last albums. There are slight nuanced differences and alterations to the sound (Dosh being one of them), but Bird is repeating himself. On the large scale, "Noble Beast" is vastly different from all 2008-2009 albums so far. Bird has created a style all his own. But within that style, "Noble Beast" sounds like all of his others. His past three albums have employed the same formulaic process: loop, sing, solo. During live shows, his loop technique makes for an interesting performance in which he builds each song up from the ground in front of the audience. But after three albums of an unchanged Bird, it is getting old.
The other limitation of the Bird sound is the loop pedal itself. All great songs rely on a forward momentum. The songs need to feel as if they started in one spot and ended in a different one. The loop pedal makes Bird's songs feel as if the musical idea is being stacked on itself, rather than progressing horizontally on a forward path.
I have been critical of this album. Not because it is bad, but because it is Bird. The uniqueness of his style proves that he is capable of creating groundbreaking music with every album. By his standards, "Noble Beast" is a safe and frankly unchallenging album. Yet despite all of this, Andrew Bird has created something that nobody else could.