Artist : Andrew Bird
This Week I'm Listening To...
Andrew Bird is a Chicago musician, formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and who plays a bitchin' electric violin, as well as mandolin, guitar, and (of all things) glockenspiel. Oh yeah, he is also one superb whistler. You can read more about him here at Wikipedia.
TMPoE is his 2005 solo release. It's hard to classify this album. Wiki calls it Baroque Pop, and that's as good as any appellation.
YouTube Links...
You can hear the album version of the fantastic track, Fake Palindromes, (audio only) here. For a live version of him doing FP at Bonnaroo (whatever that is), click here. You can see another video from Bonnaroo, A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left, here.
What's To Like...
Simply the best electric violin-playing since the early days of ELO. Excellent arrangements; bizarrely surreal lyrics (with a chemistry bent!); skilled musicianship; and nice rhyming schemes. The best way I describe him is as a slightly-psychopathic Mensa nutcase version of (Tiptoe Thru The Tulips) Tiny Tim.
Bird is also a techno-geek, who uses some cool devices to allow him and one other performer to sound like a 4-piece band. You can read about this at the above Wiki link. The main thing to recognize in those two Bonnaroo videos is that none of that music is piped in.
Oh yeah, the album cover is très cool, too.
What's Not To Like...
Not much. His guitar-playing is a notch below his virtuoso voilin performances. And while it is impressive how many instruments he and the drummer can play at once, one wonders if things would be easier if they added a keyboardist and a guitar player to the band. Still, this is mere quibbling.
"I like long walks and sci-fi movies,
You're six foot tall and east-coast bred;
Some lonely night we can get together,
I'm gonna tie your wrists with leather,
And drill a tiny hole into your head." (from Fake Palindromes)
Andrew Bird brings an original sound to the music scene. He's everything Britney Spears is not. You'll have to give it a close listen in order to appreciate the strange, subtle, and intellectually-stimulating lyrics. In spite of the somewhat psychotic atmosphere to TMPoE, this is not a depressing album.
With 13 cool, catchy and complex tracks (only the last cut, The Happy Birthday Song, dips to being merely "mediocre"), we'll give TMPoE a solid nine stars, and see if we can find his 2007 (and most-recent) release, Armchair Apochrypha.
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