Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Andrew Bird certainly got people talking with his latest album, Noble Beast (Fat Possum). Back in January Miles Raymer criticized him in Sharp Darts for making fussy, overcalculated music that lacked heart and cited his embrace by NPR and the New York Times as evidence of his middlebrow blandness (though if you ask me, trying to establish guilt by association with those institutions is a bit of a stretch). This was like blood in the water for Bird’s fans, and the back-and-forth in the online comments got pretty overheated–especially over the title of the column, “Pop White People Like.”
His words have never connected with me like his melodies, and that’s the case with the new album as well. Noble Beast contains some of his most accomplished, gorgeous, and memorable tunes, like the breezy opener, “Oh No” (which Raymer singled out for the emotional detachment of its lyrics), and the episodic “Masterswarm.” But bunch of songs in the middle of the album are fairly generic Bird–though they’re pretty and well-made, I’ve had trouble recalling them.
