Simply put: Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha makes me feel really sad. There’s something lemon juice puckery about it, in a good way. There’s a sort of exhausted, slap-happy moodiness to it, the kind of feeling you get after a long road trip or an all-nighter or any particularly strenuous endeavor that takes a lot out of you, when hysterical laughter can easily turn into hysterical sobs. This album heats up the inside of your face with the unshed tears of gratitude for the beauty of the world around you, of disgust for the injustice and cruelty in it, and fatigue from trying to make sense of it all.

This particular mixture of sentiment becomes all the more poignant in light of Bird’s fixation on projecting his songs through the playful — but no less treacherous for that playfulness —kaleidoscope of childhood: all mad scientists and elementary school biology lessons and action figures and games of Operation. It puts one in a mind of Dickens’s moppets, Salinger’s Glass family, the Peanuts gang, Dahl’s protagonists, even Clementine’s tearful reminiscence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that people don’t understand how lonely it is to be a kid. It’s that wise, sad knowingness of precocity, the pensive melancholy of innocence overwhelmed. And that may be why Armchair Apocrypha feels like such a new level of brilliance for Bird, because, instead of just singing for the psychic isolation of childhood in hindsight like so many artists have before him, he’s updating it for the clear, blue mournfulness we’re living with now. He’s composing anthems of earnest bewilderment that touch us in the small, quiet place where we know that, before we can attempt to take any corrective action in response, we have to sit with our confusion and helplessness as the surest way of honoring its purity. Like the amazing members of Chicago’s Bird Collision Monitors, who walk the perimeters of skyscrapers in the Loop before dawn during spring and fall migration, while scanning the sidewalks for avian commuters who have smashed into the windows high above, Bird wants to lend us a hand and patch us up and ferry us off to safety when the Self has collided, sometimes violently, with the Empire.

Yeah, I just laid a simile about bird rescuers on you in a review of the new Andrew Bird album. The audacious blatancy of the symbol can’t be entirely unwarranted, though, when Bird himself has allowed the album art to be festooned with back-of-the-head portraits of several beautiful feathered specimens. That kind of overt identification is another perfect example of the youthful weltanschauung he’s working with here, the way that a child will attempt to make sense of her place in the world by literalizing an abstraction, like a name, in order to personalize it and, through it, connect to something more easily grasped, more easily objectively observed.

Yet it’s also a wonderfully compact, almost Zen, mode of storytelling, that one-to-one ratio where the metaphor actually becomes the story. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans in the house will know what I mean here (“My boyfriend turned into a monster after I slept with him for the first time”), but you can also see it in something like the brilliant Moulin Rouge, where the story itself is telling sad stories about sad stories, dramatizing the subtext of the genre it’s cannibalizing and pushing it so hard that it loops the circle from the obvious all the way back around to the painfully elegant truth. So, yes, the bird is really a Bird, the armchair is really an armchair, the Self really does split in two through the natural process of mitosis, and, if he’s going to sing a song about violent empires, damn right he’s going straight for the “Halliburton attaché cases.” (Without any direct evidence to the contrary, I’d also be willing to bet that the snozzberries do, in fact, taste like snozzberries.) It’s like he’s taking us by surprise with the sleight-of-hand voila! of a highly reflective surface that gives us back the beauty of a great work of art all pearly and opalescent when it shimmers as its own mirror image.

Then throw Martin Dosh’s beats underneath it all, erupting like a spilt bag of marbles skittering across a clean linoleum floor, and you’ve got yourself an album here. (Or, as Ted Leo once sang, “It’s the sonics, not the phonics/It’s all in the delivery.”)

This considerably bleak heartbreaker of an album is extraordinarily well disguised as a warm, lavender-scented bath for your ears. Rather than occasionally peaking, like The Mysterious Production of Eggs, with a few immediately captivating stunners like “Fake Palindromes” or “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” the whole thing simmers evenly, thrillingly, like Kid A would if someone immersed all its futuristic dry ice in the liquid humanity of Bird’s more organic instrumentation, letting off fantastic, billowing clouds of carbon dioxide that completely engulf your head while you’re listening.

These songs will make your heart beat a little faster, will make your belly go a little flip-floppy the way it does right before someone new and exciting leans in to kiss you. They’ll make you want to laugh nervously, the base of your spine sharp and on edge, with something like disbelief that songs this sumptuous can just be handed to you—that you can just have them after clicking a few buttons on your computer or exchanging bits of paper for a little square plastic box at your neighborhood record shop. They seem to be made of something so vital, so precious that you’d willingly, eagerly, put your head inside a lion’s mouth for the privilege of hearing them. Instead, they’re basically ours for the taking, and, listening to them, we feel like we’ve gotten away with something extremely valuable, something that by all rights should be under lock and key, something that if planted in the dirt would make tomatoes grow the size of beach balls, if mixed in with milk and sugar would make baby bunnies develop British accents and a kicky, polo-chic fashion sense.

Of course, even if you’ve pillaged your best friend’s MP3 library or done some online sleuthing to download gratis copies of these little wonders, they’re not really free. We’re paying for the emotional goldrush with our daily attempts to withstand the unavoidable realities of contemporary life. We’re paying with our panic, our mourning, our doubt, our occasional exhilaration, our persistence in the face of it all, and our deep, aching sadness. The mop-topped magician with an arsenal of musical instruments and a battery of looping pedals certainly won’t be able to keep us from danger, but he’s going to take the time to sing to us in a language we understand.

Andrew Bird Official Site
Fat Possum Records
Generator 79