Break It Yourself by Andrew Bird

A beautifully free-flowing set of tunes that soar and waft like a flock of starlings, building to a quietly epic mood that is too ruminative and introspective to suffer from grandiosity. 

When the sun shines outside, I challenge you to listen to Break It Yourself and not smile.

Above all, Andrew Bird is a highly skilled musician capable of crafting an album full of delightful little moments that make the album worth a fair listen, and more.

By playing it straight and singing it even straighter, he’s created an intensely listenable and emotional album that’s impossible not to relate to.

Disparate and idiosyncratic yet still unified and every day, Break It Yourself is a record which is beguilingly simple but retains and recasts Bird’s signature complexity.

There’s an avid attention to detail, small instrumental tracks, and a wry, almost deprecated sense of humour at points.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

It represents a further fleshing out of ideas more recently explored in the career of a well recognized songwriter.

Break It Yourself often plays like being front row at the world's most engaging hootenanny.

The hooks don’t quite sink in as far as some of those on past records, and the diversity doesn’t quite match either, but the depth of the intelligent, philosophic experience grows after each listen.

An album with a solid first half, that restores the energy and vitality of Bird’s musical vision, and then slowly and steadily leaches that energy back out of it.