ANDREW BIRD: THINGS ARE REALLY
GREAT HERE, SORT OF (2014)
1) Cathedral In The Dell; 2)
Tin Foiled; 3) Giant Of Illinois; 4) So Much Wine, Merry Christmas; 5) My
Sister's Tiny Hands; 6) The Sad Milkman; 7) Don't Be Scared; 8) Frogs Singing;
9) Drunk By Noon; 10) Far From Any Road.
This is yet another «minor» release, perhaps
not worth a lengthy review, but well worth a few verbal niceties. Either
suffering from writer's block (and I certainly do not blame him for that at
this point in his career), or simply in search for something slightly
different, our friend Andrew here releases a short CD with ten covers of songs
by The Handsome Family — an alt-country duo from Chicago/Albuquerque,
consisting of husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks. I've listened to a few
of these songs in their original versions, and they sound more or less like an
alt-country record is supposed to sound: firmly rooted in the genre's basics,
but bravely struggling to avoid the genre's clichés and overall shallowness — lyrically
intelligent, musically competent, listenable, but not particularly inspiring.
The Andrew Bird touch, though, does these songs
some major good. Sparse, minimalistic arrangements (although he does employ
all of his band from the previous album) and especially Bird's familiar tenor give
them extra romantic vulnerability and extra emotional depth; he also makes
significant melodic changes to suit his own style — for instance, the original ʽFar
From Any Roadʼ had a bit of a spaghetti-western aura to it, with an epic brass
section and all, whereas Bird's guitar-and-eerie-violin-only arrangement
actually does a better job of conveying a wanderer's desert experience with a lonely
cactus.
One thing about the Sparks duo (no, not those Sparks — Brett and Rennie, I mean)
is that they write almost surprisingly decent lyrics, which frequently attract
more attention than the music and may actually explain Bird's interest in them.
Not every country outfit, not even every alt-country
outfit, would write a song about the Köln Cathedral, for instance, and then go
from there to a "fiberglass castle in Wisconsin" (ʽCathedral In The
Dellʼ) — but somehow Andrew Bird seems just like the guy that you'd associate
with singing a song that takes the Cathedral as its central metaphor, maybe
because everything about Bird is so «high», like the Cathedral itself — the
singing, the whistling, the violin playing, always stuck somewhere high up in
the clouds.
Then there's the mystical/religious metaphors,
like the one with the cactus in the desert, where it is hard to understand if
the metaphor is spiritual or amorous or both, but the desert imagery is used
cleverly all the same, and Bird's haunting arrangement does phenomenally well agree with New Mexican desert at sunset
(something I have had the pleasure of experiencing personally a few times, so I
know what I'm talking about here), making ʽFar From Any Roadʼ the definitive
highlight of this brief experience.
That said, do not expect any great songwriting
or innovative arrangements on the whole: the basic structures of the songs are
fairly traditional, the style is fairly well unified, and there are no attempts
to dazzle the listener (in fact, Bird's violin is kept strictly in check
throughout, and the acoustic guitar parts are not particularly interesting by
themselves). I would say that the most intriguing aspect of the album is simply
that we get to witness the process of taking a non-Bird song and effortlessly transforming
it into a Bird song — so it is instructive to listen to this stuff back to back
with the originals, see how this man's brain works «when given the data».
Without the originals, this is simply another small bunch of very typical and
predictable Andrew Bird, albeit with some new, different lyrical angles. Short
and sweet, I give it a usual thumbs up, but only because it is adequately low
on ambition — and offers us no clue as to whether this guy still has it in him
to properly amaze us, rather than give us what we already well know, sometime
in the near (or faraway) future.
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