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 represents a further fleshing out of ideas more recently explored in the career of a well recognized songwriter.
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.
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.
My favourite of the three Andrew Bird albums I've heard so far - I'm finally starting to understand what the fuss is about.
This expansive folk has a natural ebb and flow to it, with well worked in chamber orchestral detours.
I'm sorry, I was bored after the opening track. Andrew Bird sort of painted himself into a corner with this record.
FAVORITE TRACK: DESPERATION BREEDS...
The writing isn’t as good as My Finest Work Yet but holy damn the instrumentation here is so incredibly superb that it makes up for it. The combination of plucked violin, beautiful orchestral arrangements, and his freakishly on tune whistling makes for some of the most lush and blossoming instrumentation I’ve heard in a while
It’s okay. As I’ve said in other AB reviews, his music doesn’t translate well to recording - when live, he is a force that needs to be seen to be appreciated.
The songs are fine, he’s still a virtuoso of the violin (& whistling)… but most of his albums won’t blow you away.
1 | Desperation Breeds... 5:30 | 90 |
2 | Polynation 0:45 | 70 |
3 | Danse Caribe 5:19 | 80 |
4 | Give It Away 4:31 | 85 |
5 | Eyeoneye 4:07 | 100 |
6 | Lazy Projector 4:59 | 85 |
7 | Near Death Experience Experience 4:29 | 85 |
8 | Behind the Barn 1:02 | 75 |
9 | Lusitania 4:03 | 90 |
10 | Orpheo Looks Back 4:53 | 85 |
11 | Sifters 4:11 | 95 |
12 | Fatal Shore 5:01 | 80 |
13 | Hole in the Ocean Floor 8:16 | 100 |
14 | Belles 2:53 | 90 |
#17 | / | Paste |
#20 | / | American Songwriter |