At the bottom of a canyon, most men would howl. Isolated in the wilderness, unshackled from the pretense of civility, a yelp of primal kinship is supposed to rumble deep within, an exulting return to base instinct. Unless Jack London novels and Reese Witherspoon movies have lied to us, anyway.
But when Andrew Bird went native last year, he didn’t so much as whisper. Instead, he clambered down into Utah’s Coyote Gulch and recorded Echolocations: Canyon, an instrumental folk-classical song cycle that scarcely rose above a purr. In an atmosphere where every sound carried magnitudes, the Chicago singer-songwriter remained slight; it was some of his most experimental and ruminative work, in a dense catalogue that has folded in chamber-pop, rustic Americana, swing and Romani rock. (Not to mention, Echolocations boasted some pinnacle twee titlework: "The Canyon Wants to Hear C Sharp" is a hairsbreadth from a Zach Braff script note.)
Since releasing his first album in 1996, Bird has been a consistently gentle hand that belies a fitful mind, his sharp-edged intellect making invariably lovely inlets. This is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who devotes equal attention to his violin and guitar onstage, a voluble and arcane lyricist who whistles full solos with the blithe, pitch-perfect clarity of a damn angel’s piccolo. But while Bird could putter along on smug displays of his technical prowess, the sort he nodded to in his earliest records, he only grows more inclusive with age. Like Punch Brothers and Sufjan Stevens, he slots his conservatory chops into increasingly accessible pop melodies, aiming for kinship over virtuosity.
Are You Serious is Bird’s first traditional album since 2012’s Hands of Glory—save Echolocations and a Handsome Family covers disc, and the lolling I Want To See Pulaski at Night EP. It’s deceptively straightforward at first, unfolding genially as more guitar-driven rock than he’s attempted before, almost a sidestep of ambition with freewheeling frayed ends. But it’s still got all of Bird’s standby elements—the esoteric wordplay, the many stratas of strings—subtly edited into economy. "Capsized," the opening track and lead single, is a bit of a red herring, vigorous and barnburning; it’s no ear-shredder by any means, but next to the tranquility of Bird’s most recent fare, it’s My Bloody Valentine. Guitars corrode Bird’s lamenting voice, which adds a nü-country hitch to his grousing; guest Moses Sumney sands the edges with sweet harmonizing. (The excellent guitarist Blake Mills also sits in with Bird’s band throughout.) "Saints Preservus" is one of scant instances of Bird’s whistling; it’s an eerie, light flourish here, capping pizzicato strings.
This is also Bird’s third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it. But Bird’s hectic mind, which once likened love to "assured asphyxiation," still can’t leave well alone; in "Valleys of the Young," a brawny power ballad, he opens with the cerebral skirmish, "Do you need a reason we should commit treason/ And bring into this world a son?" Crashing guitars offer the resolution, an openhearted expanse that nods to Pulaski at Night. In "Bellevue," a lovely, swooning ballad and the album closer, he is thunderstruck—"Now I found someone who can slake my thirst/ In a land beset by drought"—but it’s forebodingly titled, sharing a name with one of the country’s most infamous psychiatric hospitals.
The album’s most curious track is "Left Handed Kisses," a thorny duet with Fiona Apple. It posits Bird as the jaded bard and Apple the sentimental muse, albeit one sapped by his cynicism; she addresses it directly in lyrics that only grow more self-referential. "The point your song here misses is that if you really loved me/ You'd risk more than a few 50-cent words in your backhanded love song," she warbles, delivering that mouthful with improbable serenity. By the time the coda kicks in, appendaged with his cry, "Now it's time for a handsome little bookend," the meta musings have become a wearying knot. It’s an example of Bird’s puppyish energy—why write a mere love ditty when you can slam through its fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man? – and one of two times on Are You Serious that Bird gets a bit self-congratulatory in his cleverness. The other is the title track, which jostles spaghetti western-leaning strings with Bird’s drawls of, "You used to be so willfully obtuse/ Or is the word abstruse?/ Semantics like a noose/ Get out your dictionary." The accuser manages to be a healthy amount of both in that quatrain, an irony that likely doesn’t escape him.
The album’s best melody lies in the violin crests of "Roma Fade," conduits of real wonder; Bird opens giddily, then interrupts himself with a tourettic burst of creepiness: "You may not know me but you feel my stare," he intones, as even the guitars shudder to an apprehensive stop. Then he backtracks to the slightly more tender notion, "If she sees you, it changes you/ Rearranges your molecules." For a fastidious artist who once explained his fairly hippie-dip songwriting strategy as "Does the universe need to hear this again?" it’s a telling line. Still curious, still appraising, Bird offers an intellect remarkably porous to change.
