Violinist extraordinaire, singer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird’s second album of 2012 is a companion piece to March’s Break It Yourself. Where that album threatened to cross over into pure pop, however, Hands Of Glory has its roots firmly in the country and folk music of the south. Of the eight tracks, just three are Bird originals, one is a reworking of an older song and four are covers.
Opener ‘Three Wild Horses’ sees Bird channelling his inner Ryan Adams, and pretty impressive it is too: all brooding bass, staccato guitar-lines and yearning vocals. ‘When The Helicopter Comes’ is a Mississippi mud-pie of dark southern gothica, but then it was written by The Handsome Family, complete with lyrics about the sky swimming in lightning fire, trees shaking and screaming.
‘Railroad Bill’ is the kind of traditional, down home country, that wouldn’t seem out of place on an old Boxcar Willie or Johnny Cash album. Bird’s fiddle flits and folds in around the melody with a life all its own. Similarly Townes Van Zandt’s ‘If I Needed You’ is stunningly gorgeous, treated with all the reverence of a Sunday School hymn, especially the resounding a capella harmonies on the ending.
‘Orpheo’ is a pared-back-to-the-quick reprisal of one of the tracks from Break It Yourself, where gently plucked strings give way to the most mournful fiddle solo you’re likely to hear this year. By his high standards, however, it, and ‘Something Biblical’ are a bit Bird-by-numbers.
The closing ‘Beyond The Valley of The Three White Horses’ is beautiful, with overlapping layers of gorgeous strings, as Bird effortlessly moulds classical and country in a big, nine-minute melting pot of styles. Experimental and otherworldly, it’s as far from radio friendly as it is possible to get, like Wilco meeting Phillip Glass in a New York subway station. It’s brave, bold and brilliant.
Not as coherent as previous Bird releases, but Hands Of Glory has enough moments of real beauty to make it worth your while.