Andrew Bird's music is in part defined by the way he marries the traditions of the fiddle and violin-- two very different styles played on the same instrument. If March's  was his violin album, full of careful pop-leaning arrangements, then is its fiddle complement. It's a set of rustic songs born of his old-timey live sets as well as the loose sessions at his barn in western Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore such weighty Biblical issues as death and resurrection, sin and salvation, creation and Armageddon.