Critically acclaimed composer, singer and violinist Andrew Bird quietly soars to new heights with his first Righteous Babe release. This lush, gorgeous collection of 7 original songs, his own adaptation of a Galway Kinnell poem, and a Handsome Family cover showcases Bird's gift for conveying subtle emotional states through music. In addition to his signature violin (which he often plays like a guitar), the virtuoso instrumentalist employs glockenspiel, organ, whistling, and tape loops to set the scene for the intimate, haunting stories he tells through his lyrics. Bowl of Fire bandmates Kevin O'Donnell (drums, percussion, glockenspiel) and Nora O'Connor (vocals, guitar) accompany Bird, and producer Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Will Oldham) crafts a stunning, almost orchestral setting for the recording. Also included on the disc is an 8-minute Quicktime film on the making of the record by director Robert Trondson.
Review by Gregory McIntosh
With Weather Systems, violin virtuoso Andrew Bird took another conscious step to broaden his career when he moved out of Chicago to a farm in northwest Illinois, renovated the barn into a recording studio, and left the Rykodisc label for the small indie Grimsey (the album was later licensed to Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label) to create his most distinct recording to date. Only two of the Bowl of Fire members lend their abilities here (hence the billing of the record as a solo venture): longtime comrade Kevin O'Donnell, with his fluid and melodic drumming, adds to much of the recording, as does vocalist/guitarist Nora O'Connor, whose voice sounds like it was made to duet with Bird's. Contributions by Lambchop collaborator Mark Nevers on minimal guitar and production round out the cast on this moody and transfixing effort. The violin is the most prominent component by far; layer upon layer create beautifully complex string sections and saturate the soundscapes behind Bird's eloquent lyricism. This is nothing new, as evidenced on his astonishing predecessor, The Swimming Hour, but his approach to the instrument -- a great deal of pizzicato, strumming, and liberal use of effects -- suggests that Bird prepared not only for a unique advance on his songwriting, but also how he would pull off these songs in a live solo setting, which was partially documented on his live EP of 2002, Fingerlings. An excellent display of this layering approach is the truly progressive title track -- one of the greatest moments in Bird's career. The entire track is assembled solely with multi-tracked violins fluttering in and out, one fingerpicked almost like a banjo roll, and at the three-and-three-quarters-minute mark, an octave pedal is applied to the pizzicato violin, pitching the notes down two octaves to provide a bassline underneath a vivid, cinematic, delicate, yet broad and sweeping choir of violins and whistling. Not to get too far ahead; the title track is not the first example of Bird's aptitude for whistling on Weather Systems, or indeed for his entire catalog, but this recording (his fourth full-length) is the first to showcase his ability to do so, adding another dynamic to the talented vocalist. In fact, the opening track, aptly titled "First Song," begins with a whistled melody and O'Connor's guitar accompaniment, then breaks into a comfortable waltz lyrically borrowing from and based on the Galway Kinnell poem of the same title. The journey through the rest of Weather Systems is just as relaxed, passing through Bird's most sinister composition, "I," with its slightly atonal and creepy, high violins; the pop gem "Lull," guided by O'Donnell's shuffling drums and rhythmic vocal play by Bird and O'Connor; and an inspired take on the Handsome Family's "Don't Be Scared," which serves as the crescendo of the album. In the end, Weather Systems is the kind of perfection any number of artists strive for; the performance is passionate, lucid, and engaging, and the recording has depth and warm ambience to the point that the room itself becomes an instrument (one can hear the creaking of the floorboards under Bird's feet on the title track). The album in its entirety achieves a rarity in pop music where the production, performance, and sincerity -- with arrangements which never sound forced -- meet the quality of the songwriting, resulting in a timeless effort where the sum is greater than its parts.
Andrew Bird
Weather Systems
[Righteous Babe; 2003]
Rating: 8.3
Fashion comes and goes, and art frequently goes with it. Fashion rather curiously caught Andrew Bird in its current in the mid-90s, as he became erroneously linked to the regrettable neo-swing movement via his violin contributions to the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a band who I maintain were themselves unfairly lumped in with a movement that they largely transcended. The fact is, Bird's music, both as an accomplice to the Zippers and with his own band, Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, has never really fit with any kind of trend, and he's better off for it-- what he winds up with on each of his albums is always hard to pinpoint and frequently possesses a timeless quality that only a select few recordings ever manage.
You have to appreciate novelty and cabaret humor to get into Bird's first two albums, Thrills and Oh! The Grandeur! Those records channeled the parlor music of the 20s along with Berthold Brecht and Django Reinhardt to create a pastiche so effective it might as well have been the real thing. But two years ago, Bird branched out on the stunning Swimming Hour, basically a sonic time capsule for the 20th century that loaded everything from American mountain folk and jump blues to straight-up rock and roll and orchestral pop into a single, masterful casing. If there had ever been any doubt that Bird wasn't tied to the neo-swing scene, The Swimming Hour killed it swiftly.
With Weather Systems, Bird's first record without the Bowl of Fire moniker on the sleeve, he's managed to synthesize his myriad influences to the point where you can't hear any of them distinctly anymore. These nine tracks, written at Bird's rural Illinois barn studio, hint at broad American musical traditions without being tied directly to any of them. A stripped down backing band consisting of Nora O'Connor on backing vocals and guitar, Kevin O'Donnell on drums and Mark Nevers on "space guitar" keeps things fairly simple, allowing Bird to shape the sound with his vocals and truly amazing violin playing.
Bird is easily one of the best violinists ever to devote himself to popular music (as opposed to, say, Shostakovich), as his palette of sounds on the instrument is so broad here that it's sometimes slow to dawn that you're hearing a bow on strings. He weaves intricate layers of pizzicato skittering and legato texture everywhere, turning himself into a small orchestra to create a series of beautiful, well-considered arrangements for his songs. "First Song" rolls in like dust off the plains, with Bird whistling a loopy spaghetti-Western fanfare, while his fingerstyle violin plucking slowly creates a rich bed for his and O'Connor's harmonies. The deliciously evil "I" shatters the pastoral mood, though, as Bird's dissonant violin arrangement includes some strings pitch-shifted to sound like demon cellos and O'Connor's guitar sputtering like a dying gunshot victim. The vocal melody floats uneasily amidst the drones, and it takes a second to realize just how little Bird is using to create one of the most sinister songs I've heard all year.
"Lull" bobs on O'Donnell's brushed drums and Bird's lilting violin ostinatos, with verses that develop like something off of Paul Simon's Graceland, retaining the basic shape of the melody, but inserting subtle substitutions in phrasing to keep you surprised. The loose male/female harmonies sound so natural and unstaged that this could be two people singing together anywhere, just passing time. The barebones cover of The Handsome Family's "Don't Be Scared" is so full of ache and longing it sounds like he wrote it himself.
The disc closes its too-brief runtime (nine songs in just over half an hour) with an untitled instrumental that slyly reprises the violin undercarriage of "Lull" while spinning a brief keyboard melody nicked from the beginning of "Don't Be Scared" into a full-on rhapsody of swelling violin while O'Donnell pounds away on what sound like kettle drums in the background. If you close your eyes and turn it up loud enough, it feels like you're levitating. That Bird can stand this far out in leftfield and still make music so colossally affecting is what makes him one of my favorite current artists. It's quite possible that neo-swing's flash-in-the-pan also constituted Bird's 15 minutes of fame, and that's a damn shame, because this is music for the ages that demands to be heard.
-Joe Tangari, October 31st, 2003
Following a busy year or two on the road, Andrew Bird retreated to a remote valley in Western Illinois near the Mississippi, converted an old barn into a studio, and got down to work recording "Weather Systems," his forthcoming CD. The result is a delicate and atmospheric collection of songs that were set to tape with producer / engineer Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Will Oldham).
The songs unfold within an expanded palette of sounds including whistling, glockenspiel, wurlitzer, and tape loops. Bowl of Fire band members Kevin O'Donnell and Nora O'Connor appear on the recording. The disc also contains an 8-minute "film trailer" of a documentary about Bird by director Robert Trandson. Weather Systems was released by Grimsey Records April 1, 2003, and re-released on a wider scale on June 10, 2003 by Righteous Babe Records.
It was released throughout Europe on Fargo Records in February 2004 with the extra track "Sovay."
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