Andrew Bird
Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of...
Release Date: Jun 10, 2014
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Adult Alternative Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock, Indie Folk
Record label: Wegawam
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Album Review: Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of... by Andrew Bird
Very Good, Based on 10 Critics
Based on rating 8.1/10
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.
Based on rating 8/10
Indelibly linked through their shared time in Chicago during the mid-to late- ‘90s and early ‘00s, 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.
Based on rating 8/10
Continuing with the easy tone set by 2012's Break It Yourself and its stripped-down companion piece Hands of Glory, Andrew Bird retreats even further from the elegant pop orchestrations and looping of the decade prior, turning in his most ardently rural album to date. Things Are Great Here, Sort Of... marks yet another era of Bird's prolific and ever-evolving career.
Based on rating 8/10
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. His latest project, Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of… is a full album's worth of covers of the Handsome Family, an alt-country band that has basically released an album every other year since forming in 1993.
Based on rating 7.5/10
That Andrew Bird has chosen to record an album entirely of Handsome Family covers will surprise very few. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist may not fit the profile of a natural iconoclast, but he's hardly known for playing things by the book. For the most part, he does whatever he feels like, whenever he feels like it. .
Based on rating 7/10
Head here to submit your own review of this album. A collection of covers is rather like comparing a print of an artwork with the original - all the elements are still there, it looks roughly the same, but the representation is often crisper even though it lacks the idiosyncrasies that made the original interesting in the first place. You may actually prefer it hanging in your house though, the clean lines matching your modern taste.
Based on rating B-
The musical world of Andrew Bird often comes across like a whimsical library, the whistling wonder traipsing around the room of comfortable tables and chairs, picking up everything from complex tomes to classic kids books to reference in his own yet-unfurling epic, as woodland creatures dart around. Oh, and there will be snacks. There will. On new covers album Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…, the book that Bird draws from the shelf is one written by his friends, The Handsome Family.
Based on rating 3/5
Twenty years after they released their first album, the Handsome Family finally have been around long enough to be rediscovered. It’s long overdue, too, as husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks have been quietly and methodically amassing a body of work that ranks among the most vividly imagined songwriting to emerge over the past two decades. Why there has been relatively little interest in them since 1998’s critically-lauded, Jeff Tweedy-aided Through the Trees isn’t too terribly baffling: they have no natural constituency.
Based on rating 3/5
One of depression’s more insidious and debilitating symptoms is a loss of faith in one’s ability to communicate. It’s a two-headed monster, depression, producing in those who suffer both a fundamental sense of inadequacy and shame in themselves and an equally fundamental sense of the profanity of everything around them. Very quickly the imprisoned realizes that these feelings are just feelings, and their appearance as empirically and rationally realized truths becomes just as disgusting as the feelings themselves.
Opinion: Excellent
Andrew Bird's relationship with the music of friends and peers The Handsome Family is a long, happy one, stretching as far back as 2003's Weather Systems and his gorgeous version of 'Don't Be Scared'. 'When That Helicopter Comes' appeared on 2012's Hands Of Glory, while his contribution to the Red Hot charity compilation Dark Was The Night in 2009 was a take on the Albuquerque-based husband and wife duo's 'The Giant Of Illinois'. He has described the latter as a song which immediately caught his attention, in particular its suggestive lyric "The sky was a woman's arm." "That's a typical line of theirs that is a little bit ambiguous and mysterious and awesome," he said in an interview with the Austin Chronicle.
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