By Alex Szeptycki

The album may be loose and jagged, but there are no half-baked moments because Andrew Bird’s ear for rhythm, and his impressive improvisational skill, are too inventive to ever be dull.

Cover art of Andrew Bird’s Outside Problems.

There’s a moment on Andrew Bird’s album Outside Problems where his experiments begin to make sense. The ceremonious violins of “Festivus” march in time with metronomic drums, serving as an effective foundation for a soft and meandering electric guitar line. The music could be the score for a royal ball, the mismatched instrumentation simulating the energy of a babbling brook. I was reminded of the film Marie Antoinette, where director Sofia Coppola paired the drama of the Ancien Régime with the modern stylings of Gang of Four, the Strokes, and Aphex Twin. Not much of the movie still resonates for me — save for that beautiful contradiction.

Bird’s music is full of these intriguing oppositions. The Illinois native possesses a wide-ranging instrumental virtuosity as well as an ear for pop music. Outside Problems proves that he has a knack for coming up with pleasing hooks in what is an entirely instrumental album. “Epilogue” revolves around a plucked fiddle that supplies a kind of drum beat, its cascading and layered riffs syncopating and running into each other endlessly. This stripped-down but infectious tune also offers a strong sense of rhythm.

Most of the tracks on Outside Problems develop in the same way. Plucked strings serve as percussion, layers of melody take turns interplaying with the rhythm section. Improvising each successive melody over a set rhythmic base, Bird achieves his interlaced sound with nothing more than an amp and a looper pedal. This approach lends the tracks on this project an unvarying musical structure; these are, essentially, seven variations on the same idea.

The music on the album has been collected from a series of outdoor recordings Bird made while recording his 2022 release, Inside Problems. Some of the ideas presented here can be heard in full on that album. The natural backdrop is barely noticeable. When Bird pauses performing, you hear the gentle hum of white noise in the background. The ethereal softness of  the plucking in “Mormon House Party” almost fades into the ambience of the background, while the twitter of birds can be heard in between the melodies on “Mo Teef,” a tune that alternates between fiddling and whistling.

For all of its appeal, the music on Outside Problems feels, for the most part, like an assemblage of sketches and experiments.  Structure and focus meander. But that doesn’t make this album a bore to listen to. Take “Mancey,” which is driven forward via blues-infused string plucking and finger snaps. Lilting fiddle passages are the initial response, until they become looped into the rhythm section. Bird sings over this progression via soft, wordless tones. The energy becomes raucous in a way that exceeds the limitations of a simple recording setup. Essentially, Bird has created a jam session — all by himself. And it is that feeling of collective interplay — generated by a single musician — that makes Outside Problems such a joy to listen to. Sketches these tracks may be, but as rough as they are, they exude a spontaneously vivid imagination.

Bird’s use of looping pedals and instrumental skill lend a compelling weight to his songs; nothing here feels bare-bones. Only when he eventually strips away the instrumentation does his creative solitude become apparent. On “Tik Tok,” the closing track, the focus stays on Bird’s fiddle for the duration, as he slowly supplies, at times aimlessly, a screeching, haunting melody. The ambience of nature presses in around the performance, gently smothering Bird’s fiddle in a soft fuzz.

Outside Problems avoids many of the pitfalls that inevitably come with an artist’s “side project.” The album may be loose and jagged, but there are no half-baked moments because Bird’s ear for rhythm, and his impressive improvisational skill, are too inventive to ever be dull.

Alex Szeptycki is a writer from Charlottesville, VA. He recently graduated from Stanford University, majoring in American Studies with a focus in contemporary art and pop culture. He’s currently working as a freelance writer at the Arts Fuse while navigating post-grad life in a pandemic.