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Rating: * * * *
This American songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has a surname befitting his music.
He's a mighty fine whistler and on his fourth solo album he twitters more sweetly than ever before, all the while singing with a voice akin to Radiohead's Thom Yorke - only not as tortured.
In fact, late last year he appeared alongside Radiohead and Fleet Foxes - another band he has more than a striking resemblance to - on top producer Nigel Godrich's TV show and podcast, From the Basement.
As well as the pastoral folk leanings of Fleet Foxes, Bird also recalls the gypsy style meanderings and instrumentation of Beirut's Flying Cub Cup. Not that this Chicago-born songbird is derivative at all.
Initially Noble Beast might come across like a singer/songwriter album but it morphs, and often warps, into something more lush and juicy. Songs like Masterswarm (where he sounds particularly like Yorke doing Karma Police before it sashays off into it's own divine little world), and Tenuousness escalate with the help of everything from hand claps, thigh slaps, lovely creaky strings and plucks, and that Goddamned endearing whistle.
Then, and this is where Noble Beast starts to warp, on Not A Robot, But A Ghost he whips up an incessant dead-beat groove that rivals anything Radiohead did on Kid A.
Like Bird, Noble Beast is a record that befits its name. Don't dismiss it as a singer/songwriter album, nor an oddball work of folk pop, it's simply an understated beauty.
Scott Kara
