For much of his career, Andrew Bird has been torn between a thirst for experimentation and an inclination towards folksy song-craft. Judging by recent interviews, he still hasn’t quite made peace with his baked-in talent for home-spun alterna-country. Which may explain his ongoing noodler-in-residence gig at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, wherein he composes instrumentals on the fly and then subjects them to random infinite looping.
Having found an appropriate medium for his avant-garde instincts the good news is that, as a songwriter, he’s swung towards the straight and narrow. Recorded in a barn deep in the Illinois hinterland, Break It Yourself is the most direct thing he’s yet done, a gorgeous elegy to love, regret and the challenge of keeping a long-term relationship on the boil. There’s plenty of his signature looping and treated violin, but the real special effect is his voice, a wind-weathered baritone that conveys the rough-at-the-edges charm of heartland America without lapsing into alternative country cliché. The sea – both a destructive force and avenue of escape in Bird’s telling – is a recurring character: the album’s most moving moment, a duet with St. Vincent’s Annie Clark entitled ‘Lusitania’, likens drowning to a doomed romance, the two lovers dragging each other under, in a desperate embrace. The characters perish at the end but the sacrifice is not in vain.
Husky, musky and beautifully plaintive, Break It Yourself feels like the start of something new and exciting for Bird.
ED POWER