★★★★★
Since the late '90s Andrew Bird has been churning out genre-bending music on a regular basis. Whether you find yourself enamored with Bird's swing-inspired beginnings, his chamber-leaning indie rock or his most recent foray into pseudo-traditionalism with Hands of Glory, Bird always infuses a powerful sense of personality into his tunes. Perhaps that's why Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of feels like much more than an album filled with covers...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2014-06-11
★★★★★
Indelibly linked through their shared time in Chicago during the mid-to-late-1990s and early 2000s, Andrew Bird and the Handsome Family's Brett and Rennie Sparks have a long history together. There's a sense of mutual admiration expressed by each in concert, often affectionately recalling their time spent together in the Windy City. Bird made his first Handsome Family-related appearance on the duo's 2000 release In the Air, contributing violin on three tracks...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-06-09
★★★★★
Andrew Bird is one of those guys who have to make music. Trained in the Suzuki method since he was able to hold a violin, he has appeared on multiple releases every year since the mid-'90s, from his myriad solo albums and his work with Bowl of Fire and Squirrel Nut Zippers to his collaborations with Dosh, the Muppets and anyone else who needed a little extra soul in the strings department...
- exclaim.ca
2014-06-03
★★★★★
For the past two or so months, we've been able to sit with Andrew Bird's latest experimental EP, I Want to See Pulaski at Night. It's raw, sparse, experimental, and beautiful. It features Bird's inventive violin work, looping both percussively and melodically over lilting rhythmic accompaniment. It's eerily haunting at times and tranquil at others. Then again, that description could be applied to most of Bird's work. So what's remarkable about Pulaski...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-02-04
★★★★★
Andrew Bird' s two albums from last year, the companion LPs Break it Yourself and Hands of Glory , were born countryside, in a barn in west Illinois. That's where Bird shacked up to crank out hours' worth of the mostly acoustic material that drove home a big, and particularly solitary year for him.
So, when he repeatedly bellows, "come back to Chicago, city of lights" at the crest of his new EP, I Want to See Pulaski at Night, how can you not scan some trace of eagerness, or at least wishful...
- consequenceofsound.net
2013-12-31
★★★★★
Pulaski is a city in both western Virginia and south-central Tennessee, and yet, in the one song with lyrics on Andrew Bird's new EP, he's begging an anonymous someone to come back to Chicago. Given that signpost, Bird's mostly likely referring to Pulaski Park on the west side of town, but place doesn't necessarily matter on I Want to See Pulaski at Night...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2013-11-21
★★★★★
It's hard to think of Andrew Bird's new EP as an EP. It's an appropriate seven tracks, arranged to be reasonably cohesive across a half-hour, and concerned only with a handful of musical ideas, which it teases out intelligently and patiently. So far so good. Bird fashioned the release around a single song, "Pulaski at Night", which he wrote but did not want to hold until he had enough for a full-length...
- pitchfork.com
2013-11-19
★★★★★
Even before he wrote the score for the 2011 indie film Norman, Andrew Bird always made cinematic music, combining the basic ingredients of spaghetti western soundtracks - violins, acoustic guitars, lots and lots of whistling -with something hipper, meatier, and more appropriate for the iPod generation. On Break It Yourself, his first solo album since 2009's Noble Beast, he dishes up more baroque pop songs with brainy, tongue-twister lyrics...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
And Bird puckers up plenty of times on his eighth album, Noble Beast, a haunting and graceful collection that includes everything from a 58-second instrumental to a seven-minute epic. Bird and his backing band-who play everything from flutes and clarinets to "shortwave" and cardboard boxes-create an aural wonderland filled with dreamlike symphonies and organic rattles and hums. Noble Beast begins with a plucked acoustic guitar, rolling gently beneath Bird's soft whistle...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
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