Apr 06, 2016
By this point in Andrew Bird’s career, you’ve probably listened to him, or at least heard of him. He’s on his thirteenth studio album amongst countless other EPs and live albums. As I imagine, there are one of two camps you can sit in. While both camps acknowledge that he is an incredibly talented violinist and singer (and whistler!), one camp finds his lyrics to be contrived and nonsensical and the other usually finds some sense of beauty and poetry. They’re not mutually exclusive though, and I am likely one of the ones with a firm foot in both schools of thought.
For full disclosure, I love his music. He’s my third most-listened-to artist of all time, I’ve seen him live, and at least for his last four albums or so, I’m one of the ones who grab the record on release day and then beg their less inclined friends to take a listen.
My friends and I often discuss the concepts of growers vs. showers (“show-ers”) when it comes to music. A shower is a track that is immediately catchy, the kind of track you get stuck on in a new album, and often you over-listen to these tracks fairly quickly and they fade into the depths of your iPod over the years. At the most extreme, most Top 40 tracks are showers.
Growers are tracks that are not the most immediately listenable or likeable, and often reward a persistence to appreciate them over time through delving better into the lyrics, themes, and often the act’s unique style. I’ve always struggled with critically acclaimed bands that I don’t enjoy (looking at you, the National), because I’m unsure whether I genuinely don’t find them to be in line with my taste or whether they’re grower tracks that I really haven’t given a proper chance. All of my favourite bands right now dependably did not click on the first listen, and most bands that did click on the first listen are bands I have grown tired of. What has been inspiring about reading music reviews from some more reputable sites is that seemingly on their first listen, they can identify what’s a quality track that needs to simmer and what’s crap.
Most good albums are somewhere in the middle. There is a track or two here and there that is immediately catchy (whatever your definition of catchy is) and hooks you into the album, and as you explore it further and further you navigate your way through most of the album and hit the more rewarding pieces. I remember my experience listening to 2012’s Break it Yourself and I wasn’t blown away. That album, during that listen, wasn’t anywhere near the quality of Noble Beast or The Mysterious Production of Eggs, but there was hope. “Fatal Shore” had a small guitar riff that dependably replicated a lazy summer’s day, and it was enjoyable to listen to Annie Clark’s (St. Vincent) collaboration on “Lusitania”. From those tracks I delved further and further, arriving at what are now two of my favourite Andrew Bird tracks of all times: “Lazy Projector” and “Near Death Experience Experience”.
The songs that immediately grab my attention on Are You Serious include the title track “Are You Serious”, “Puma”, and “Left Handed Kisses”. Each of those tracks seemingly calls back to parts of his discography I hold dear. “Are You Serious”, has a musical inclination similar to “Imitosis” off of 2007’s Armchair Apocrypha. It’s catchy, has a seductive playfulness to it, you pick up the chorus on the first listen and can sing along in future listens. “Puma” has themes of the medical process that surrounds cancer covered previously in “Near Death Experience Experience”. “Left Handed Kisses” is the collaboration that offers the universal appeal of male/female duet with the added name brand of Fiona Apple’s folk, not dissimilar from “Lusitania” mentioned above, or his countless collaborations with the talented Nora O’Connor.
“Puma” is perhaps is the best track to highlight my overall initial thoughts of the album. It’s a personal track (dealing with his experiences with cancer in his family) and it deviates more towards pop as a genre than the majority of his previous work. It’s good but, after years of expecting him to more or less deliver poetry, it feels lazy. “Feels” is an important word there. The main lyric in Puma is: “Cause [?] to the room that she's a girl and not a puma
/ And light that shines is not a pearl, it's just a tumour.”
Without knowing the rationale behind that lyric, it honestly sounds like we used a rhyming dictionary to find something which goes along with “tumour”. Digging a little deeper, we discover that identifying as a puma was a coping strategy one of his loved ones used during their cancer treatment. It’s basically a track I now really enjoy but would elicit a groan when sharing with friends, unless I offer them the context. The only reason is I have the context is Andrew Bird’s own annotations online. Should a listener be expected to check them? Should an artist be expected to offer them?
The overall shift towards a slightly poppy sound, at least personally, is unwelcome. This is reminiscent of Belle & Sebastian’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance released last year: an act that I enjoy primarily for unplugged folk or chamber/baroque pop shifting to a grander sound to maybe capture a new audience. I can’t particularly blame him for evolving his sound however, in fact that’s usually encouraged with most bands. After twelve previous studio albums, if this album grabs him a new listener, that should be celebrated.
Perhaps the best track on this album is “Pulaski”, previously featured in the 2013 EP Pulaski At Night, and the reason I might hold that opinion is because it sounds like what he sounded like three years ago. Here’s the original EP version:
So, is this a mediocre album (compared to his previous work) or am I just waiting for some latent appreciation to kick in? Is it a grower or a shower? Is the writing actually lazy at times or just misunderstood without context? I will settle on a lazy, cliché ending for this review myself: you decide.
Image: Wikipedia