Music Review
Remix
January 2009
3.5 out of 5 Stars
Link
Multifaceted musician Andrew Bird doesn’t let his big vocabulary—lyrically or musically—spoil his refined chamber pop. On Noble Beast, Bird incorporates tasteful flourishes into his polymath approach, sounding more breezy and stripped down than he did on Armchair Apocrypha. “Anonanimal” and “Effigy” open with crisp, clipped guitars, while “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” shuffles by with a fuzzy backbeat. The bookish songwriter blogged about the making of this album for The New York Times, and while his prose is clear, it can’t compare to his lyrics, which are as brainy and mysterious as his music.