If you were to quickly peg “Eyeoneye,” our first taste from Andrew Bird’s latest full-length album, titled Break It Yourself, it would sound most at place with the guitar-heavy material of 2007’s Armchair Apocrypha. And, at its strongest points, the song fits that album’s general high quality, from the album title-featuring call-and-response chorus, to the whistle solo, to the song’s highlight, a ferocious and muscular finale that ties the four-minute affair with enough rapidly increasing tempo to make the songs previous moments seem like a blur.
But, where “Eyeoneye” lacks is in its transitions. The song struggles to get from its initial verse to its chorus, and likewise seems lost finding a smooth transition to its concluding minute. As a first taste from a highly anticipated album, we can only hope that Break It Yourself features songs that stretch what we’ve seen from Andrew Bird a little better than “Eyeoneye” does, and that the rest of the album finds a little more emotional resonance. Bird is at a point in his career where we have to wonder if that career-defining album will ever come, or if it, in fact, already did with The Mysterious Production Of Eggs. Let’s hope “Eyeoneye” is just a jumping-off point for an album full of strong material.
