Apart from fame and riches, former
Squirrel Nut Zipper Andrew Bird has it all. He is to the violin
what Jimi Hendrix was to the guitar, which is to say not merely a
virtuoso but also a visionary. In Bird’s delicate hands, the
violin is only a vehicle, the most convenient means by which to
manifest his genius. When he’s not playing supernaturally
beautiful melodies on it, he’s plucking it, strumming it,
running it through various electronic gizmos, and rendering it
virtually unrecognizable. But Bird is more than a brilliant
violinist. He’s also a brilliant singer, songwriter,
guitarist, and (don’t laugh until you’ve listened)
whistler. He also happens to be quite comely, in a
consumptive-19th-century-poet kind of way.
As long as you’re not prejudiced
against the disgustingly gifted, Bird’s latest full-length, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, is sure to delight. As the title suggests,
it’s a whimsical album, from the Jay Ryan drawings that adorn
the lyric booklet to the lyrics themselves, which reference
dewy-eyed Disney brides, Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries,” mah jongg, and MX missiles. But whimsy
doesn’t have to mean flimsy. Like Ryan’s cartoons,
whose bright surfaces belie their dark content, Bird’s songs
are a sublime mixture of silly and serious. They might sound goofy
at first, with their glockenspiels and whistling interludes and
elaborate rhyme schemes, but that’s all part of the plan.
“Many of the songs are about childhood under attack by
shadowy forces that want to measure, commodify, and buy and sell
things which can’t be measured,” Bird said in a recent
interview. “Measuring Cups,” one of the album’s
many highlights, is a heartbreakingly direct variation on that
theme: “Get out your measuring cups and we’ll play a
new game/Come to the front of the class and we’ll measure
your brain/We’ll give you a complex and we’ll give it a
name/Put your backpack on your shoulder/Be the good little
soldier/It’s no different when you’re older.”
Comparisons of Snowglobe with the
late, great Neutral Milk Hotel are inevitable and not entirely
unfair. After all, describing a band on its own terms is much
harder than linking it to better-known bands, and rock fans are,
for the most part, lazy subliterates who skim over fanciful
adjectives anyway, hence the obligatory “RIYL”
(“recommended if you like”) tag at the bottom of press
releases, marketing one-sheets, and record reviews. Like NMH,
Snowglobe favors trumpets, musical saws, and other instruments not
usually associated with rock bands. Snowglobe even relocated
briefly from its Memphis, Tenn., home base to Athens, Ga., the East
Coast headquarters for the Elephant 6 collective. But let’s
face it: In the Aeroplane over the
Sea, the second and final NMH release,
was one of the greatest rock albums of the 1990s. Seven years after
its release, its fuzzed-out folk and religiopsychosexual epiphanies
sound as singular as ever. Doing the
Distance, Snowglobe’s
second (but, let’s hope, not final) full-length can, in this
lofty context, only disappoint.
But just because Distance isn’t as
great as a great band’s greatest album doesn’t mean
that it’s a failure. In fact, many listeners will no doubt
prefer it to Aeroplane, which is noisier, messier, and rife with
disturbing metaphors. Snowglobe’s principal songwriters, Tim
Regan and Brad Postlethwaite, who also sing and play various
instruments, make excellent use of the band’s eclectic
palette. Pedal-steel guitars, violins, cellos, flutes, Mellotrons,
and yes, trumpets and musical saws create a lush setting for the
co-frontmen’s dreamy psych-pop compositions; although the
arrangements sometimes verge on busy, the overall mood is
charmingly chaotic.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2005.
