Andrew Bird – Weather Systems

Violinist Andrew Bird has sensuous delicacy so pure and strange that he often seems like an ethereal presence in his own songs. Fronting Andrew Bird’s Bowl Of Fire, he creates a still center with this aspect of his talent; on Weather Systems, a solo album recorded in a refurbished barn in western Illinois, he drapes sunset hush from the center outward.

Relative quiet allows Bird greater subtlety. The first song, aptly entitled “First Song”, adapts part of Galway Kinnell’s poem of the same name into a strolling cowboy lament delivered intimately enough that even Bird’s high whistling lacks the faintest whiff of irony.

The rest of Weather Systems flows from similarly earnest, calm places. Bird’s musical grace and poise — natural offshoots of the eloquence with which he bows and plucks his violin — act as buffers for his exploration. Likewise, two Bowl Of Fire members, drummer Kevin O’Donnell and guitarist/vocalist Nora O’Connor, appear as familiar guides into territory altered by the season.

Bird’s singing — soft yet confident, slurring words yet clarifying hidden meanings — remains coolly amiable, providing courteous introductions to the eastern European lilt of “Action/Adventure”, the Irish-folk rhythms and gentility of “Lull”, and the mod-jazz of the instrumental “Skin”, which could inspire spy-movie fantasies.

Weather Systems will more likely inspire dreams: It’s a minor disc bearing endless drowsy pleasures, enchanting changes of direction, and a bewitching manner of settling in the mind like a fond memory of something that never really happened.