Most works of western tonal music are characterized by the regular recurrence of rhythmically patterned pulses. Andrew Bird’s eccentric cross-pollination of gypsy ballad violin and folk infused art-rock is defined by it. The importance of meter and repetition is clear on Noble Beast , even thematically, as whistled motifs emerge in defiant contrast to already established themes.

Noble Beast is Bird’s fourth solo album and it made its debut this past January as a live stream on NPR. While the melodic electricity from Armchair Apocrypha has been subdued, the inter-connected ambience laid out on Noble Beast is more clearly defined, and the scope of the album is decidedly more visceral than the esoteric meanderings of Bird’s prior work. Indeed, on Noble Beast, Bird has created a vivid landscape, layered by elegiac violin melodies and punctuated by pizzicato notes, plucked guitar and clip-clop percussion that is more approachable to the casual listener.

On a thematic level, Bird seems to struggle with the classification and taxonomy of the natural world. It’s probably little coincidence that Noble Beast was released right near the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Bird elicits lugubrious and meticulous observations of the surrounding world, with scientific specificity and attention to detail as pertains to the rise and fall of species. On Souverian, he laments the inability of cyclical nature to overcome internal wounds. “while thistles will burn my feet / you promise spring, still my lover won’t return to me.” And on Anonanimal, Bird seems personally afflicted, even infected, by the evolutionary process. Singing of a sea anemone Bird predicts, “I will become this animal / anomalous appendages, anonanimal, anonanimal.” Evolution apparently comes with its own unforeseen casualties.

Bird’s drifting song structures are more coherent and sophisticated on Noble Beastthan previous albums, if nothing less than for their tonal quality and gracefully collective harmony. Where Bird’s previous works presented stuffed canvases full of interesting sounds, the latest incarnation embraces the same ornamental delicacy but with a focal point. For example, on Effigy and Tenuousness the album’s best songs, Bird uses church organs and operatic whistling not as mere sidenotes, but as compliments to vocal harmonies and intricate guitar picking. To be sure, the same affinity for odd phrases and abstruse lyrics is ever-present, but Bird seems more concerned here about creating a verbal topography, suffused with syllable play and alliterated language, than the actual meaning of words themselves. From the “calcified arythmetists” of Oh No to the decaying “anthurium lacrimae” of Natural Disaster Bird evokes an alternate version of the world as he sees it, eerily seductive as it is bizarre.

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