Andrew Bird
Noble Beast
Fat Possum
3.5 out of 5 stars

Eight albums into a colorfully protean career, Andrew Bird has yet to release a stinker, or even a moderately bad-smelling album. Noble Beast is no exception. But despite sporting a brawny lineup of consistently high-quality tracks, something about Beast feels a tad watered-down. Maybe it’s the gnawing sense that, for the first time, Bird is primarily taking stock of the sonic territory he has staked out on previous albums instead of plowing forth into uncharted terrain.

This isn’t to say that all of Noble Beast is self-derivative (and even when it is, it’s mostly salvaged by Bird’s keen ear for melody and impressively ornate strong structures). But Bird is at his whimsical best when he’s spreading his wings. “Anonanimal” starts out frigidly beautiful, with arpeggiated violin plucks and achy strings evocative of a yawning ice cavern before it spikes off into a hard-edged interplay of frenetic drumming and proggy guitar searing. The track prickles with a gritty intensity that Bird has never explored before. Instrumental “Unfolding Fans” sleepwalks through a hazy chamber of zipper noises and trilled violin loops that shimmer with a captivating otherness.

Much of the album’s experimentation comes in its inventive use of eclectic kitchen-sink percussion. “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” scuttles along on a rhythmic spiderweb of clinking silverware, treated static and what sounds like the shuffling of seashells. Labyrinthine standout “Masterswarm” clinks eerily on a crisply brittle texture of castanets, handclaps and washboard scrubbing.

On his more left-leaning tracks, Bird constructs baroque pop that truly lives up to the word baroque, erecting sprawling sonic mausoleums which invite the listener to get lost. This exploratory quality gives the album’s avant-garde songs a high replay value, especially when coupled with the swooping flux of Bird’s shapeshifting croon.

The drawback is that a handful of Beast’s relatively standard-issue cuts come off as a bit vanilla in comparison with its more adventurous moments. “Effigy,” while possessing a tenderly wistful refrain about “fake conversations on a nonexistent telephone” feels like a mere blueprint of the more compelling barnyard balladry on The Swimming Hour. “Natural Disaster,” though plenty pretty, sounds like it could have been an outtake from any of Bird's last three albums, lending it an expendable air. While these more predictable tracks are anything but bad, they do little to justify Beast’s plump 54-minute length.

This is especially true with the gratuitously epic “Souverian,” a sleepy-eyed exercise in earnestness that wanders adrift for seven minutes without ever climaxing. The track is unfortunately placed at the end of the album, dragging it to a close with an unbecoming sputter. Moreover, the straight-laced somberness on “Souverian” represents an underlying trend of “adult” seriousness that permeates Beast, for better and for worse.

Still, amid such a hearty song-cycle, these are considerably minor gripes. And while Bird’s trademark feather-hearted quirkiness is in shorter supply here than usual, the album’s more upbeat offerings still sparkle with contagious optimism. “Fitz & Dizzyspells” rollicks forth at a stomp-along tempo, sandwiching a free-fluttering violin solo between relentlessly hooky verses. The hook-factor is equally high on downy lead single “Oh No.” And Bird’s bookish preference for literate, image-conjuring lyrics rife with five-dollar words is just as vividly wacky as ever, as he warbles about everything from “flailing fetal fleas” to chinless men scratching their beards.

To call Noble Beast a disappointment would be way off the mark; it’s chock-full of juicy substance. But in a portfolio as strong and innovative as Bird’s, the album feels somewhat minor.