New Music - Andrew Bird, "Heretics"


Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005; Righteous Babe) was one of those albums I had heard about for quite a while before checking out. I picked it up only after connecting the dots between about ½ the ’05 year-end lists I read, figuring I was missing out on something special. Turned out I was right. Since then it’s been in a pretty regular rotation around the Pop Headwound office (bedroom, work, car, etc.). Songs like “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”, “Fake Palindromes”, and “Masterfade” mixed enough of a folk-jazz aesthetic into its indie rock boundaries that it became something wholly original sounding.

Bird is set to return on March 20th with Armchair Apocrypha, his debut for Fat Possum (also, by the way, the new home of Dinosaur Jr.). Bird spoke to Billboard last year while working on the album. He said the songs are “big and spacious, with long, stretched out phrases, a sense of large, open air. But it's also really concise. I'm trying to keep it to 10 songs, but short is pretty hard to pull off when you're trying to create space”. Read the whole article here.

Check out this song from Armchair Apocrypha:

MP3 - Heretics

And this one from The Mysterious Production of Eggs:

And hear more at his myspace page. Don’t miss “Fake Palindromes”.


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