The Eighth Voreblog Readers Forum: High Fidelity Edition

Where do I even begin?

 

We’re taking a suggestion from Mr. Andrew Cashmere on a Readers Forum topic: What are your top 5 favorite albums of all-time? Given U2’s new release yesterday, we thought this would be an apropos time to broach this subject. We’ll chime in with ours in the comment thread. Feel free to use this forum to make us see the light on Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast if you think we are still wandering in the darkness.

 

[photo: Touchstone pictures, imdb.com]

Friday Recommends: Dark Was The Night

 

 

Benefit albums, like the Oscars and New Year’s parties, are usually a mixed bag. The latest Red Hot compliation, Dark Was The Night, is no exception. The difference with Dark is that its high points are quite high, and plentiful.

Red Hot is an international charity founded to raise awareness for HIV and AIDS through music and pop culture. To commemorate its 20th year, Red Hot released Dark, an indie rock all-star gathering produced by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National. The 31 songs are split onto two discs; we’ll carry the all-star analogy a bit further and compare disc one ( “That Disc”) to the Western Conference NBA All-Stars and disc two ( “This Disc”) to the Eastern Conference.

Both discs feature top-notch talent, but where disc one coheres into a thematic whole (think of Chris Paul orchestrating a fluid offense of Kobe Bryant, Amare Stoudemire and Brandon Roy) disc two never quite becomes more than the sum of its parts — like, say, a Mike Brown-coached squad with LeBron James and Dwayne Wade but Allen Iverson and Mo Williams at point guard, two guys who will look for their own shot regardless of who’s on their team. Meanwhile, every other player on the floor thinks, “We’ve got LeBron James and Dwayne Wade and none of our point guards want to pass me the ball, so what am I here for?” In this analogy, Arcade Fire and Andrew Bird are James and Wade, respectively, and while they both turn in solid performances (especially Wade –er, Bird– covering the Handsome Family’s “The Giant of Illinois”), nobody else quite picks up the slack even though there’s talent to burn. Spoon delivers a buzzy but disposable opener ( “Well Alright”) while The New Pornographers never quite go to eleven on “Hey, Snow White.” Beirut and Yo La Tengo deliver solid numbers (“Mimizan” and “Gentle Hour,” respectively) and Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch contribute a beautiful duet ( “Lua”), but Cat Power butchers “Amazing Grace” and My Morning Jacket gets in touch with its soft jazz/lounge lizard side on “El Caporal.” Lots of talent but little chemistry: we’ll jump sports and call disc two the New York Yankees of indie rock benefit albums. 

The standouts on disc one are a fantastic cover of Vashti Bunyan’s “Train Song” by Feist and Zooey Descanel’s future husband, Ben Gibbard; Bon Iver’s “Brackett, WI” (Ben’s vote for album MVP); The National’s “So Far Around the Bend”; Yeasayer’s “Tightrope”; and an operatic, ten-minute, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cover of the Castanets’ “You Are The Blood” by Sufjan Stevens. Disc one is a little darker, a little gloomier, but without question the disc that will stay with you longer, and that — if you’re like us — you’ll keep coming back to. (We’ve had “Brackett, WI” — which you can hear on the Dark Is The Night homepage — on repeat for the past 30 minutes.)

Finally, the album art is pretty sweet. It features Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” gothic angels and demons in anguished conflict. As Aaron Dessner says in the liner notes, the images “evoke a ‘fallen’ world of struggle, but also the capacity of art to inspire us to rise above the obstacles put in our path. Our nights may be dark, but music gives us inspiration and hope of brighter days to come.” Good music. Good cause. It’s a no-brainer.

Noble Beast

Andrew Bird was born with a thesaurus in place of his spleen.

 

Grumpy-pants week continues here at Voreblog. First the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Then David Denby dissed Slumdog Millionaire. Even the inerrant Christian Bale supposedly lost his temper.

And now we must level our critical judgment on Andrew Bird’s latest album, Noble Beast.

Before we do so, let’s make a few things clear:

1. Nothing should prevent you from finding more room in your life for Andrew Bird.
2. Noble Beast is better than the majority of albums that will be released this year.
3. Both members of Voreblog would, in a heartbeat, gladly bear Andrew’s children if asked.

 

That said, this album is a disappointment.

It doesn’t have a center. Its songs have the tendency to peak halfway through and then fizzle out. Bird’s wordplay, always cryptic and bordering on nonsensical, is especially cryptic and nonsensical. What exactly do the lines “From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans / Greek Cypriots and Hobis-hots / Who hang around the ports a lot” mean?

Yes, part of the charm of Bird’s music is how subtly it grows on you, burrowing in with every listen. But we’ve listened and listened, and so far Noble Beast doesn’t stack up. Have we told you exactly how much we love Armchair Apocraphya and — especially! — The Mysterious Production of Eggs? Erin has seen Andrew Bird perform twelve times. He is a one-man whirling dervish of sound, looping snippets of violin and percussion over one another and sprinkling in guitar, glockenspiel and a trademark whistle. You owe it to yourself to see Bird in concert — if not twelve times, then at least once.

Noble Beast does have its moments. “Fitz and the Dizzyspells” is a bouncy little rocker that’s also the album’s best sing-along. (We can already picture the concert crowds joyfully shouting, “Soldier on, soldier on!”) “Effigy” is one of Bird’s most autobiographical songs, given his reclusive sojourn on a farm in Illinois before releasing The Mysterious Production of Eggs: ”Fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone / Like the words of a man who’s spent a little too much time alone / When one has spent too much time alone…”  It’s interesting to reread this post from Bird’s blog Measure for Measure and then listen to “Oh No,” the album’s first single; it feels sunny, until you dig into the lyrics and realize, as Bird writes on his blog, that the song is asking the question, “What does it take to wake us up, we who feel so little? Aren’t we almost like sociopaths, only the kind that don’t kill people?”

Martin Dosh, the multi-instrumentalist and co-collaborator whose presence buoyed much of Armchair Apocraphya ( “Simple X” being one of its highlights), is less effective on Noble Beast. “Not A Robot, But A Ghost,” the only song he co-wrote on this album, begins with what sounds like an army of silverware jumping out of the dishwasher and marching across the kitchen floor. The lyrics evoke conflict and violence ( “I crack the codes that end the war”) and may or may not end with a bomb going off ( “There’s something burning / It casts a pall / It’s melting numbers right / Off the walls”). Bird has likened songwriting to code-cracking ( “Writing lyrics becomes like running multiple code-breaking programs in your head”), but this song, like the album, doesn’t add up to something greater than its individual parts.

The best song on the album, “Anonanimal,” returns to the personal note of “Effigy.” The lyrics “I will become this animal / Perfectly adapted to the music halls / I will become this animal / Anomalous appendages / A non-animal” hint at the tension Bird has written of before: The need for creative space ( “Solitude, boredom, and the desperate need to entertain oneself are ideal stimuli for songwriting”) versus the very public, cluttered life of a touring musician. How do you balance one against the other? What does the artist sacrifice by coexisting in both worlds? The sense we get from Noble Beast is one of conflict and tension, marked by experimentation that occasionally ends in a cul-de-sac but occasionally finds the open road. It’s not a bad album, and we’ll spin it many more times before year’s end. But we had such high hopes. 

In another Measure for Measure post, Bird plainly confesses, “I listened to [Noble Beast] recently and I’m concerned about how much I like it.” But, he wonders,

If I like my record too much does it mean I’m getting complacent? Or am I just getting better at making records sound the way I want them to? It worries me because what I love about songwriting is that there is no guaranteed formula for success. I’m hoping that getting better at making records means, for one thing, that I am learning how to leave room for serendipitous moments. I always want to hear how things didn’t go according to plan.

 

Noble Beast is the sound of things that don’t go according to plan. It also has its serendipitous moments. We don’t wholeheartedly recommend it, but we do recommend Andrew Bird. We can’t wait for his next one.

——————–

Given how many Andrew Bird fans we know are out there, what’s your verdict on Noble Beast? Time for an insta-poll!

 

[photo: Cameron Wittig]

Friday Recommends: Hearing Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast Now

Hat tips to both Mark Hoobler and Scott Guldin for pointing out that you can hear all of Andrew Bird’s new album Noble Beast here on NPR’s site. Much more gushing about Mr. Bird to follow soon, probably shortly after the album officially releases on January 20. For now we’ll just say that the single “Oh No” (track one) is growing on us, and that in typical Andrew Bird fashion he has managed to match the absurd vocabulary of the first six lines (below) with a musically compelling arrangement. In anyone else’s hands, these verses would be a joke:

In the salsify mains of what was thought but unsaid

All the calcified arithmatists were doing the math

It would take a calculated blow to the head

To light the eyes of all the harmless sociopaths

Oh arm and arm we are (with all) the harmless sociopaths (2x)

Calcium mines were buried deep in your chest (2x)

 

And yes, “salsify” is actually a word.

You can also listen to a live chat with Mr. Bird here.

In other indie rock news, Sasha Frere-Jones adds a postscript to his New Yorker profile of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) by noting that his new EP Blood Bank (also out Jan. 20) can be heard on the band’s MySpace page.