© 2024 SDPB Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Review: Andrew Bird, 'Are You Serious'

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released.


/ Courtesy of the artist
/
Courtesy of the artist

In concert, Andrew Bird attracts intense adulation — screaming fans, mass sing-alongs, the whole bit — but his records have grown subtler over time. Always a thoughtful songwriter, prone to impeccably chosen words and pristine arrangements, Bird has still found a way to mature and open up in a long career that spans more than a dozen studio albums.

For his most recent official release, 2012's Break It Yourself, Bird crafted a sublime headphone record that was perfectly suited for contemplation and concentration. Four years later, with Are You Serious, he sets aside a few more songs for muted but memorable ruminations on love and chemistry; this is, after all, his first album since getting married and having a baby, and "Chemical Switches" and "Saints Preservus" possess the tender gravity to show for it.

But even in the slowest songs on Are You Serious, Bird's approach still includes a few key leavening agents, from springy strings to whistling so deft he was once hired to ghost-whistle for a character in a Muppets movie. That tendency helps give "Chemical Switches," an otherwise somber take on the unseen forces of science, the kind of soft lightness to which Bird is ideally suited.

Elsewhere, though, Bird's approach can be downright peppy, even forceful. "Puma" feels downright thunderous — though, this being Andrew Bird, it's the most intricately composed thunder ever — while "Left Handed Kisses" brings in Fiona Apple for a thorny duet. In the Paul Simon-esque "The New St. Jude," darkness and light coexist in the same playful line: "Ever since I gave up hope, I've been feeling so much better." (See also this doozy, which opens "Valleys Of The Youth": "Do you need a reason we should commit treason / and bring into this world a son?")

Given Bird's classical training and devotion to precision, his work has always had at least the potential to become bloodless and pale — the work of a perfectionist who agonizes over every note, only to let his busy brain mute his own beating heart. Instead, though, his writing keeps sounding warmer, sweeter, more thoughtful and approachable, while continuing to land lines that stick with you for days.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)