Andrew Bird – The Mysterious Production Of Eggs

Violin virtuoso (and whistler extraordinaire) Andrew Bird never really goes easy on you, but on a purely musical level, The Mysterious Production Of Eggs is his most accessible album to date.

Bird hasn’t fully abandoned the traipse-across-history approach that marked previous efforts; his forte is conjuring (and frequently colliding) bygone eras, and on Eggs one hears strains as diverse as the dense collages of composer Charles Ives, Bollywood and Morricone film scores, and turn-of-the-century chamber quartet music. Yet instead of coming across as overly studious and crafted, the album feels spontaneous, organic and intimate.

“Fake Palindromes”, the most rock-oriented song here, clangs as grandly as a Radiohead symphony, an anthemic blur of thrumming bass, psychedelic guitar and echo-drenched fiddle. “A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left” is another standout: Bird, singing in a rich, falsetto-teasing croon, sounds uncannily like the late Jeff Buckley, and he wraps himself in an improbable cloak of spaghetti-western pop (twang guitar, high-plains whistling) and antebellum waltz.

The record is billed as a quasi-conceptual look at “the mysteries of childhood, creativity and modern science,” though Bird’s lyrics are so obtuse it’s hard to get a handle on any real or implied storyline. That’s OK; Eggs still sounds gorgeous, and it has an onion-skin-like quality. Give it a peel or two and see for yourself.