Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird should have a jam session with Animal Collective. Not because he needs a band–the Midwestern Renaissance man can get by just fine on his own mastery of everything from the violin to Alpine whistling. On his new album, Armchair Apocrypha, Bird harmonizes his staccato plucking with a keening vibrato and his heavy strumming with a soft drone, proving time and again that he doesn’t need anybody but himself to create fluid, languid compositions. When guest vocalist Haley Bonar pops up on the track “Spare-Ohs,” you can almost feel her trepidation: she knows she’s crashing a one-person party.

But Bird seems to be suffering from the kind of spiraling introspection that his preferred studio space–a fully-functional barn in western Illinois–lends itself to perfectly. With lyrics like “Poor Professor Pynchon had only good intentions” and “Scotch-Guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized,” “Apocrypha” is aptly titled, if a little too proud of its enigmatic nature. On his previous efforts, Bird made up for his love of the obscure with melodies that jumped octaves and skipped corners. “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” from his masterful 2005 album The Mysterious Production of Eggs, is as woozy as it sounds like it should be; despite the delirium it evokes and imparts, the song is as exuberantly catchy as an ice cream truck song. Even “Lull” from 2003’s Weather Systems is the furthest thing from boring that a song about being bored could be. Bird’s lyrical playfulness and grace are most arresting here; when the line “Being alone it can be quite romantic/ Like Jacques Cousteau underneath the Atlantic” is sung with accents on every other syllable (often producing outlandish emphases), the effect is one of welcome disorientation.

On Apocrypha, with notable exceptions such as the marimba-infused “Simple X” and “Sick of Elephants” (which deserves more prominence than it gets as a buried bonus track) Bird has replaced verve with languor, spontaneity with over-deliberation. The album actually starts with a promise that the opposite will unfold. “Fiery Crash” opens with a brisk guitar then slowly adds percussion, strings, fatalistic plane crash imagery, and just a dash of whistling, culminating in a thickly-layered symphonic climax. Suddenly everything stops. There are a few anxiety-inducing moments of total silence before the music returns full blast, then finally recedes to an a cappella closing line.

It is this gap, rather than the sounds that surround it, which ends up being the true premonition of things to come. Bird confesses on one track to a “morbid fascination,” which the rest of the lyrics reveal to be with morbidity itself, and which seems to force everything into a slow motion state. The second track, “Imitosis,” is a reworking of “I” off Weather Systems and, though it’s played longer and with a more intricate structure, it feels more repetitive than creative–it’s regurgitation without the initial spark. In choosing to return to a song about the self, Bird reiterates what he considers his most fascinating subject. That’s fine, of course: Rainer Maria Rilke said, “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” But there’s a thin line between self-examination and self-obsession. Too often, Bird tilts toward the latter, and lilts his way through a drudging, nearly-stagnant chorus.

Lock him in that barn with Panda Bear and his cracked cohorts, and I bet Bird will get the kick he needs. Or maybe someone should just spike his chicken feed with Red Bull.

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