Andrew Bird has a great talent for banging words together: fatal and prenatal, cubicle and cuticle, pliers and barbed wire, two-by-four and war. His agile voice carries the careful phrases over his signature layered palette of violin, xylophone, drums, guitar and whistling.
On the recently released Armchair Apocrypha, Bird draws on terms from science, sociology and history to supplement his musings. Dissecting the lexicon of Armchair—with its myriad references to dark matter, DNA and ancient empires—is a tricky task, but it serves as a great refresher for all those vague concepts and shadowy ideas drifting around the brain from long-ago high school science classes and hazy college lectures.
“It’s pop science, certainly not supported—at all,” explains Bird of his scientific interpretations found on the record. “I don’t even know if there really are rays of dark matter, and honestly, I don’t care. I enjoy messing with the reality of it. I don’t know why I gravitate toward science.... There is always some character trying to quantify what can’t be quantified and lots of open-ended questions.”
Armchair also concerns itself with the messy business of politics. A mention of Halliburton notwithstanding, Bird’s fascination is with a deeper, more nuanced idea of politics—what happens when human beings, their wishes, ambitions and cruelty collide.
Bird’s previous album, the brilliant The Mysterious Production of Eggs, was a meticulous, tricky thing full of lyrical hints and cryptic beauty. Armchair sometimes feels like a wrestling match of ideas and words—the subject matter is dark, and it’s darkened his sound a bit.
“Eggs, to me, seems very carefully measured, carefully carved,” says Bird. “Each song was kind of weighed out to balance the next, whereas I feel this record is a bit more wild and ecstatic and reckless.”
The most notable sonic difference between the two is the ascendance of the guitar. It is the first instrument to appear on Armchair and, on the invigorating lead single “Heretics,” the guitar introduces the central riff, before passing it on to the violin.
“I’ve only been playing guitar for a few years, and it’s kind of nice to play an instrument that you don’t really know that well—it forces me to be really basic with it,” says Bird. “The first time I drove up to Minneapolis to start recording, I was listening to this Pixies record and I liked that kind of starkness...the elemental coldness of that sound.”
Despite the shift, this is still an Andrew Bird record, and therefore devastatingly pretty. His fusion of classical instruments (violin and xylophone) with a pop sensibility—and an uncanny talent for whistling—creates a distinct soundscape. Elements like the nimble, punchy plucking of “Plasticities” or the weary sorrow of his violin on the closing instrumental “Yawny and the Apocalypse” exemplify that juxtaposition. But the most exciting thing about his music remains his thoughtfulness—an expansiveness of curiosity, both musically and lyrically—which creates an ocean of depth in pop songs.
Another thing Bird loves to ponder in his music is the apocalypse, and he doesn’t necessarily think it will be all that bad. “Sure, it would really suck, and it would be hard to forage for food and protect yourselves from roaming hordes of mutants,” says Bird. “But the fantasy of the apocalypse is that it’s the chance to start over. If you can’t travel back in time and try things again, then the other choice is just to wipe the slate clean.”
AN AVIAN PRIMERA glossery of selected terms from the record (thanks, internet), paired with some insight inot Bird's lyrical licensing
by Lee Stabert
Scythian Empire (from “Scythian Empire”): An empire of nomadic herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea who dominated the Eastern part of Europe for over three centuries, and were eventually driven out by the Sarmatians. Birdspeak: A rise and fall that could serve as a cautionary tale for the American empire (“Their Halliburton attaché cases are useless”); the embodiment of the idea that everything eventually crumbles.
Dark Matter (from “Dark Matter”): Matter, not directly observed and of unknown composition, that cannot be detected directly, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. It makes up the vast majority of mass in the observable universe. It has been noted that the names “dark matter” and “dark energy” represent our ignorance, much like the marking of early maps with terra incognita. Birdspeak: The mysterious incarnation of the question of “where the true self resides”; the elusive answer to an unanswerable question; a weapon.
Mitosis (from “Imitosis”): The process by which a cell duplicates its genetic information (DNA) in order to generate two identical daughter cells. Birdspeak: A metaphor for human relationships (“what was mistaken for closeness was just a case of mitosis”); something witnessed by his “poor Professor Pynchon,” a scientist who has just come to the devastating conclusion that “we are all basically alone.”
