It’s hard to think of Andrew Bird’s new EP as an EP. It’s an appropriate seven tracks, arranged to be reasonably cohesive across a half-hour, and concerned only with a handful of musical ideas, which it teases out intelligently and patiently. So far so good. Bird fashioned the release around a single song, “Pulaski at Night”, which he wrote but did not want to hold until he had enough for a full-length. Instead, he composed a handful of instrumentals to form lengthy prologues and epilogues to “Pulaski”, comparing it to soundtracking a film. So think of the EP as the director’s cut of the main song. Or an extended mix. Or a short suite. Think of it as an EP, however, and it feels slight—never quite the sum of its parts.
“Pulaski at Night” is prime Bird: tightly crafted, lyrically witty, understated yet sophisticated in its arrangement of loops and plucks and thrums and whistles. “I paint you a picture of Pulaski at night,” he sings on the chorus. “Come back to Chicago, city of light.” The galloping violin strums give that sneaky hook its subdued grandeur and steady insistence, Bird’s bow tracing the topography of the Midwestern landscape. It sounds as though he’s trying to erase the many miles between him and the person he’s addressing, who is clearly far away. At one of his Gezelligheid shows last winter, Bird explained the song’s origins and specified which Pulaski inspired him, but there’s something so teasingly vague about the song's shadowy “you” that it’s better left unexplained. On its own, the song could be about a departed friend, a distant lover, or every fan who isn’t in the town Bird is playing that night.
If “Pulaski at Night” is Bird at his most dependably and stalwartly Romantic, the rest of the EP is just Bird. There is, admittedly, a warm familiarity to the plaintively whistled theme of “Lit from Underneath”, to the staccato plucks of “Hover 1”, to the evocative bowing on “Hover 1”. As well, a few unexpected flourishes illuminate some of these songs, such as the loose-limbed raga rhythm on opener “Ethio Invention No. 1” and the quickly fading notes that arc across “Logan’s Loops”. At times that familiarity curdles into predictability, and nothing else carries the sense of purpose and longing as the title track. Not that Bird needs to reinvent himself on a minor release like this one, but an EP is an ideal medium for indulging new experiments and rethinking one’s approach. The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form.
