| Andrew Bird — Hands Of Glory |
Andrew Bird — Hands Of Glory
"Each Andrew Bird album reassures its listeners that he is in possession of a vocabulary all his own." — Mack Hayden
Born: July 11, 1973, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Location: Chicago
Album release: October 30, 2012
Record Label: MOM & POP MUSIC
Duration: 35:08
Tracks:
1. Three White Horses (3:13)
2. When That Helicopter Comes (2:54)
3. Spirograph (4:07)
4. Railroad Bill (3:27)
5. Something Biblical (4:34)
6. If I Needed You (3:09)
7. Orpheo (4:29)
8. Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses (9:15)
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/andrewbird
Editorial Reviews
♠ 2012 release from the acclaimed singer/songwriter. Coming on the heels of Bird's critically acclaimed full-length Break It Yourself, Hands Of Glory features a brand new original track, a pair of re-worked tracks from Break It Yourself and covers of songs by the Carter Family, the Handsome Family, Alpha Consumer and others. Hands of Glory was inspired by the great fan reaction to Bird's 'old-time' sets on tour in which his full band plays to a single microphone with an entirely acoustic setup.
In french:
♠ Le prolifique Andrew Bird, apres le succes de son dernier album (Break It Yourself) propose un EP dans lequel on retrouve des titres live (ou réinterprétés) de son album et des reprises de titres country folk. Sympa.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Also:
By Mack Hayden — http://www.relevantmagazine.com/
By Stephen M. Deusner; November 1, 2012 (Rating: 7.3)
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17209-hands-of-glory/
By Billy Hamilton (Rating: 6/10); http://drownedinsound.com/releases/17366/reviews/4145799
By Kim Phelps; October 29, 2012 (Rating: 4/5 stars)
♠ For Andrew Bird, 2012 might very well be looked upon as the “year of looking back.” With this year’s earlier release Break It Yourself, the eclectic folk singer/songwriter dialed back his overdubbing and post-production mojo to create a simply arranged, tasteful collection of Americana folk rooted in the sounds of yesteryear.
♠ Billed as a follow-up to that record, Hands Of Glory (releasing tomorrow), takes this trend even further. Recorded live with a small band around a single microphone placed in a barn, this 8-song mini-LP is little more than a collection of old country cover tunes and some tasteful re-arrangements of songs from Break It Yourself. And yet (for me, at least), the impact of these eight songs is spellbinding. Apparently, less really is more.
♠ There are already some critics out there who question why this record was released separately from the earlier one, since it plays more like a “B-Sides” companion that perhaps could have been included as part of a “deluxe edition.” They claim that Hands Of Glory doesn’t stand up on its own, that it can only be understood in the context of Break It Yourself. I completely disagree with that statement. If I didn’t know who Andrew Bird was and I listened to this record, then admittedly I wouldn’t really have a clue as to what his actual range and diversity as an artist. But considering this record on its own, without any other context—it is actually quite magical. It is an experience in itself; it takes you someplace.
♠ As for those of us who are familiar with Andrew Bird’s earlier stuff, Hands Of Glory reminds us of his true roots. Behind all the interesting sound manipulations he likes to do, Bird is a folk artist, and more than that, he’s an outstanding violin player. Both of these truths are made clear on this record for the simple fact that almost all the frills are removed. His rendition of the traditional country tune “Railroad Bill” is one of the high points of the record, and you don’t want to miss the short-but-sweet fiddle solo in the middle. “When The Helicopter Comes,” one of the few cuts that uses any amount of effect, sounds like it could have come right out of a 1950’s Sun Records recording session with it’s slap-back reverb, and the opening track “Three White Horses” is a great example of how haunting Bird’s vocals can be. And throughout the record, there are these glimpses of Bird’s own “hands of glory,” in the form of some great violin work.
♠ True, this is not a record that reflects all of Andrew Bird’s creativity, nor is it meant to be—and those who are looking for the more eclectic side of him are likely to be disappointed. But by taking us back in time, and back to basics, Hands Of Glory shows us what is underneath all the studio experimentation. It is this stripped-back, raw, true talent that makes Andrew Bird the amazing artist he is.
Fortaken: http://mimo.recordingconnection.com/
Website: http://www.andrewbird.net
Press contact: Carla Sacks ()
Reservé agent: Erik Selz ()
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Andrew-Bird/104048569632913?sk=info#!/AndrewBirdMusic
♠ Andrew Bird has been hinting at the follow up to 2009’s Noble Beast since he finished the soundtrack to the film Norman last October. Recorded and produced by Bird himself in his own “barn studio,” Break It Yourself is sure to be a welcome addition to his catalog of whistling, looping songs. Break it Yourself is Bird’s twelfth album.
♠ “We had our front of house engineer Neal Jensen bring his old Tascam 8-track tape machine and Yamaha board (nothing fancy) out to my barn,” Bird said about the recording. “We rolled tape as we were learning the songs and to our surprise we started nailing the songs by the second take. I think we got a rough, unfussy honesty in this session.” Bird said the sessions for the album were a “mix of distilled, grounded songs and some wild soloing.” The band for the Break It Yourself session included long-term collaborator Martin Dosh on drums, Jeremy Ylvisaker on guitar and Mike Lewis on bass.
♠ The album includes songs like the steel-drum heavy “Danse Caribe,” the instrumental “Behind the Barn” and the lush, eight-minute “Hole in the Ocean Floor.”
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
♠ One could arguably describe Andrew Bird as the quietest, most exquisite big deal in the music business. His last album Noble Beast (2009) sold 150,000 copies in the US alone and debuted on the Billboard chart at #12. He also has cumulative album sales of well over half a million and is fast becoming somewhat of US TV veteran after appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
I♠ n the intervening three years since Noble Beast, Bird, a man who sometimes structures his live sets by selecting thematically linked songs, has continued the rigorous touring that has made him one of the hottest concert tickets around (and not just in the United States where he played to 50,000 people on his headline tour for Noble Beast – a barely announced headline show at London’s Barbican Centre in the spring is nearly sold out).
♠ He’s also settled down in New York and become a father, soundtracked the highly acclaimed movie Norman, contributed to the open ended reinterpretations of Congotronic favourites Tradi-Mods V Rockers, and collaborated on the Sonic Arboretum project with Ian Schneller, trained sculptor and founder of the Chicago School of Guitar Making http://mcachicago.org/performances/now/all/2011/742
♠ First staged at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010, where Bird performed through some fifty of Schneller’s amazing handbuilt speaker horns placed all round the venue, this ongoing experiment has been hosted this December at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, with Bird providing new site specific compositions.
♠ Let’s commence with the self-produced new album Break It Yourself. It was put together in a more traditional way, recorded to eight track at Bird’s barn in Western Illinois with a core group of drummer Martin Dosh, guitarist and keys man Jeremy Ylvisaker and Mike Lewis on tenor sax and bass. “It started out as a glorified rehearsal, the opposite of production, four musicians playing in a room together,” he says, eager to avoid the traps of modern recording. “Too many records sound like a series of decisions, not a performance.”
♠ That’s not the case here. The tongue-twisting and catchy future single ‘Eyeoneye’, is as alive as recorded sound gets. “The DVD has film of us performing the actual take. Three quarters of the way through something clicks and it injects some adrenaline,” says an enthused Bird.
‘Lusitania’, a country-flecked duet with Annie Clark aka St Vincent, a sometime touring partner and intuitive collaborator, holds the listener close in its embrace (and features a divine couplet in “You’re laying mines along your shore/ Through my hull it ripped and tore).
♠ Bird’s lyrical flights have been commented on. “I’ve been accused of being wilfully obtuse,” he concedes. But he’s happy with these songs. “Lyrically I’m closer to the bomb. I handle topics not often handled in pop songs.” Certainly, the wonderfully frisky opener ‘Desperation Breeds’, using the reported extinction of bees as a metaphor, is highly original. But the lovely melodies of the gorgeous and deeply unusual ballad ‘Sifters’ (surely worthy of reinterpretation- “No one’s covered one of mine yet,” he says) and the gloriously imaginative ‘Lazy Projector’ are just as striking.
“Who the hell is editing the story of what you were? Who inside my head decides what I choose to remember?” he says, explaining the latter. Given that, the line “I can’t see the sense in us breaking up at all’ become even more plaintive and affecting.
♠ During the song’s mixing, the great Randy Newman popped by “at half an hour’s notice. He’s a very perceptive man,” says Bird, “He was gesticulating, shouting ‘it’s like a different song’.” He was right. Half of the composition was originally commissioned for The Muppets movie soundtrack, of all things, another of Bird’s ongoing interests (Bird’s own unique version of ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ was on The Muppets tribute album and he did appear on the movie soundtrack with ‘The Whistling Caruso’).
♠ Prettier still is ‘Fatal Shore’, with Dosh’s heart-stopping punctuations leaping out. “There’s your morning songs and there’s your late night songs…,” says Bird, making it clear what time it was put to tape.
♠ But Break It Yourself has a wider reach than simply a.m. and p.m. The entirely self-played ‘Hole in the Ocean Floor’ is reminiscent of Bird’s immersive solo shows, created from loops (it also allows room for his voice to truly reveal itself), while ‘Danse Carribe’ attempts to track a style from the American South to distant Trinidad. Bird even evokes Exuma, a seventies Bahamian band described as “a Caribbean Parliament” (as in the P-funk creators, not a political institution) and Niger’s Etran Finatawa.
♠ ‘Give It Away’ is a relatively straightforward pop song, its loose chorus shaking itself free. Yet the fiddle led ‘Orpheo Looks Back’ with its energetic drones straddles the line between Celtic and North African music, perhaps not so surprising for a man who grew up playing Irish songs as well as classical violin, while the closing ‘Belles’, a minimal loop with crickets chirping underneath, is pure Bird-balm.
♠ In short Break It Yourself is as warm-hearted and eclectic as ever. It sounds like all the music and no music you’ve ever heard, from jazz to country to classical to folk and pop, visiting a thousand exotic places along the way and the public has no problem with that. Pondering his increasing popularity, which can’t simply be put down to a hard work ethic, Bird suggests why he has registered with a much wider audience. “People have been exposed to more and different things – palate is the right word. It’s a sensory thing,” he says. The implied food comparison seems apt, the ingredients don’t necessarily produce what one expects but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.
♠ As he says of his music, “It’s about the company you keep.” And what exquisite company it is.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
| Andrew Bird — Hands Of Glory |
Andrew Bird — Hands Of Glory
"Each Andrew Bird album reassures its listeners that he is in possession of a vocabulary all his own." — Mack Hayden
Born: July 11, 1973, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Location: Chicago
Album release: October 30, 2012
Record Label: MOM & POP MUSIC
Duration: 35:08
Tracks:
1. Three White Horses (3:13)
2. When That Helicopter Comes (2:54)
3. Spirograph (4:07)
4. Railroad Bill (3:27)
5. Something Biblical (4:34)
6. If I Needed You (3:09)
7. Orpheo (4:29)
8. Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses (9:15)
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/andrewbird
Editorial Reviews
♠ 2012 release from the acclaimed singer/songwriter. Coming on the heels of Bird's critically acclaimed full-length Break It Yourself, Hands Of Glory features a brand new original track, a pair of re-worked tracks from Break It Yourself and covers of songs by the Carter Family, the Handsome Family, Alpha Consumer and others. Hands of Glory was inspired by the great fan reaction to Bird's 'old-time' sets on tour in which his full band plays to a single microphone with an entirely acoustic setup.
In french:
♠ Le prolifique Andrew Bird, apres le succes de son dernier album (Break It Yourself) propose un EP dans lequel on retrouve des titres live (ou réinterprétés) de son album et des reprises de titres country folk. Sympa.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Also:
By Mack Hayden — http://www.relevantmagazine.com/
By Stephen M. Deusner; November 1, 2012 (Rating: 7.3)
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17209-hands-of-glory/
By Billy Hamilton (Rating: 6/10); http://drownedinsound.com/releases/17366/reviews/4145799
By Kim Phelps; October 29, 2012 (Rating: 4/5 stars)
♠ For Andrew Bird, 2012 might very well be looked upon as the “year of looking back.” With this year’s earlier release Break It Yourself, the eclectic folk singer/songwriter dialed back his overdubbing and post-production mojo to create a simply arranged, tasteful collection of Americana folk rooted in the sounds of yesteryear.
♠ Billed as a follow-up to that record, Hands Of Glory (releasing tomorrow), takes this trend even further. Recorded live with a small band around a single microphone placed in a barn, this 8-song mini-LP is little more than a collection of old country cover tunes and some tasteful re-arrangements of songs from Break It Yourself. And yet (for me, at least), the impact of these eight songs is spellbinding. Apparently, less really is more.
♠ There are already some critics out there who question why this record was released separately from the earlier one, since it plays more like a “B-Sides” companion that perhaps could have been included as part of a “deluxe edition.” They claim that Hands Of Glory doesn’t stand up on its own, that it can only be understood in the context of Break It Yourself. I completely disagree with that statement. If I didn’t know who Andrew Bird was and I listened to this record, then admittedly I wouldn’t really have a clue as to what his actual range and diversity as an artist. But considering this record on its own, without any other context—it is actually quite magical. It is an experience in itself; it takes you someplace.
♠ As for those of us who are familiar with Andrew Bird’s earlier stuff, Hands Of Glory reminds us of his true roots. Behind all the interesting sound manipulations he likes to do, Bird is a folk artist, and more than that, he’s an outstanding violin player. Both of these truths are made clear on this record for the simple fact that almost all the frills are removed. His rendition of the traditional country tune “Railroad Bill” is one of the high points of the record, and you don’t want to miss the short-but-sweet fiddle solo in the middle. “When The Helicopter Comes,” one of the few cuts that uses any amount of effect, sounds like it could have come right out of a 1950’s Sun Records recording session with it’s slap-back reverb, and the opening track “Three White Horses” is a great example of how haunting Bird’s vocals can be. And throughout the record, there are these glimpses of Bird’s own “hands of glory,” in the form of some great violin work.
♠ True, this is not a record that reflects all of Andrew Bird’s creativity, nor is it meant to be—and those who are looking for the more eclectic side of him are likely to be disappointed. But by taking us back in time, and back to basics, Hands Of Glory shows us what is underneath all the studio experimentation. It is this stripped-back, raw, true talent that makes Andrew Bird the amazing artist he is.
Fortaken: http://mimo.recordingconnection.com/
Website: http://www.andrewbird.net
Press contact: Carla Sacks ()
Reservé agent: Erik Selz ()
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Andrew-Bird/104048569632913?sk=info#!/AndrewBirdMusic
♠ Andrew Bird has been hinting at the follow up to 2009’s Noble Beast since he finished the soundtrack to the film Norman last October. Recorded and produced by Bird himself in his own “barn studio,” Break It Yourself is sure to be a welcome addition to his catalog of whistling, looping songs. Break it Yourself is Bird’s twelfth album.
♠ “We had our front of house engineer Neal Jensen bring his old Tascam 8-track tape machine and Yamaha board (nothing fancy) out to my barn,” Bird said about the recording. “We rolled tape as we were learning the songs and to our surprise we started nailing the songs by the second take. I think we got a rough, unfussy honesty in this session.” Bird said the sessions for the album were a “mix of distilled, grounded songs and some wild soloing.” The band for the Break It Yourself session included long-term collaborator Martin Dosh on drums, Jeremy Ylvisaker on guitar and Mike Lewis on bass.
♠ The album includes songs like the steel-drum heavy “Danse Caribe,” the instrumental “Behind the Barn” and the lush, eight-minute “Hole in the Ocean Floor.”
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
♠ One could arguably describe Andrew Bird as the quietest, most exquisite big deal in the music business. His last album Noble Beast (2009) sold 150,000 copies in the US alone and debuted on the Billboard chart at #12. He also has cumulative album sales of well over half a million and is fast becoming somewhat of US TV veteran after appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
I♠ n the intervening three years since Noble Beast, Bird, a man who sometimes structures his live sets by selecting thematically linked songs, has continued the rigorous touring that has made him one of the hottest concert tickets around (and not just in the United States where he played to 50,000 people on his headline tour for Noble Beast – a barely announced headline show at London’s Barbican Centre in the spring is nearly sold out).
♠ He’s also settled down in New York and become a father, soundtracked the highly acclaimed movie Norman, contributed to the open ended reinterpretations of Congotronic favourites Tradi-Mods V Rockers, and collaborated on the Sonic Arboretum project with Ian Schneller, trained sculptor and founder of the Chicago School of Guitar Making http://mcachicago.org/performances/now/all/2011/742
♠ First staged at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2010, where Bird performed through some fifty of Schneller’s amazing handbuilt speaker horns placed all round the venue, this ongoing experiment has been hosted this December at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, with Bird providing new site specific compositions.
♠ Let’s commence with the self-produced new album Break It Yourself. It was put together in a more traditional way, recorded to eight track at Bird’s barn in Western Illinois with a core group of drummer Martin Dosh, guitarist and keys man Jeremy Ylvisaker and Mike Lewis on tenor sax and bass. “It started out as a glorified rehearsal, the opposite of production, four musicians playing in a room together,” he says, eager to avoid the traps of modern recording. “Too many records sound like a series of decisions, not a performance.”
♠ That’s not the case here. The tongue-twisting and catchy future single ‘Eyeoneye’, is as alive as recorded sound gets. “The DVD has film of us performing the actual take. Three quarters of the way through something clicks and it injects some adrenaline,” says an enthused Bird.
‘Lusitania’, a country-flecked duet with Annie Clark aka St Vincent, a sometime touring partner and intuitive collaborator, holds the listener close in its embrace (and features a divine couplet in “You’re laying mines along your shore/ Through my hull it ripped and tore).
♠ Bird’s lyrical flights have been commented on. “I’ve been accused of being wilfully obtuse,” he concedes. But he’s happy with these songs. “Lyrically I’m closer to the bomb. I handle topics not often handled in pop songs.” Certainly, the wonderfully frisky opener ‘Desperation Breeds’, using the reported extinction of bees as a metaphor, is highly original. But the lovely melodies of the gorgeous and deeply unusual ballad ‘Sifters’ (surely worthy of reinterpretation- “No one’s covered one of mine yet,” he says) and the gloriously imaginative ‘Lazy Projector’ are just as striking.
“Who the hell is editing the story of what you were? Who inside my head decides what I choose to remember?” he says, explaining the latter. Given that, the line “I can’t see the sense in us breaking up at all’ become even more plaintive and affecting.
♠ During the song’s mixing, the great Randy Newman popped by “at half an hour’s notice. He’s a very perceptive man,” says Bird, “He was gesticulating, shouting ‘it’s like a different song’.” He was right. Half of the composition was originally commissioned for The Muppets movie soundtrack, of all things, another of Bird’s ongoing interests (Bird’s own unique version of ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ was on The Muppets tribute album and he did appear on the movie soundtrack with ‘The Whistling Caruso’).
♠ Prettier still is ‘Fatal Shore’, with Dosh’s heart-stopping punctuations leaping out. “There’s your morning songs and there’s your late night songs…,” says Bird, making it clear what time it was put to tape.
♠ But Break It Yourself has a wider reach than simply a.m. and p.m. The entirely self-played ‘Hole in the Ocean Floor’ is reminiscent of Bird’s immersive solo shows, created from loops (it also allows room for his voice to truly reveal itself), while ‘Danse Carribe’ attempts to track a style from the American South to distant Trinidad. Bird even evokes Exuma, a seventies Bahamian band described as “a Caribbean Parliament” (as in the P-funk creators, not a political institution) and Niger’s Etran Finatawa.
♠ ‘Give It Away’ is a relatively straightforward pop song, its loose chorus shaking itself free. Yet the fiddle led ‘Orpheo Looks Back’ with its energetic drones straddles the line between Celtic and North African music, perhaps not so surprising for a man who grew up playing Irish songs as well as classical violin, while the closing ‘Belles’, a minimal loop with crickets chirping underneath, is pure Bird-balm.
♠ In short Break It Yourself is as warm-hearted and eclectic as ever. It sounds like all the music and no music you’ve ever heard, from jazz to country to classical to folk and pop, visiting a thousand exotic places along the way and the public has no problem with that. Pondering his increasing popularity, which can’t simply be put down to a hard work ethic, Bird suggests why he has registered with a much wider audience. “People have been exposed to more and different things – palate is the right word. It’s a sensory thing,” he says. The implied food comparison seems apt, the ingredients don’t necessarily produce what one expects but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.
♠ As he says of his music, “It’s about the company you keep.” And what exquisite company it is.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::