Review Summary: On his latest album, Reed tries to resurrect the Eighties sounds of Tom Petty and Echo & The Bunnymen and bring them into this century.
No, not Andrew Bird, Andrew Reed. The album is “As a Bird of the Air...” The confusion could be there with this interesting combination of words. But one thing that could definitely be said about Andrew Reed’s album is that like some albums of his namesake, this album is a ‘strange bird’ indeed.
Some potential listeners might have caught the fact that Reed entered the Billboard charts back in 2018 with two tracks from his previous album “*If All the World Were Right” (If All the World Were Right #31, Cure My Mind #35). So what do you do for a follow-up?
In such situations, artists are faced with some hard decisions. You can go commercial all the way and try to come up with some even bigger hits or you can go out on the limb and do something that suits your fancy.
Well, with “As a Bird of the Air...” Reed has decided to try and find some middle ground between these two options. To some, he is known as ‘Outlier’, somebody that is known to be ‘far out’. No wonder than that after his last album, Reed has decided to isolate himself in his cabin for a year and observe nature. No music world, no social media, just him and his music. He actually built a 3 level, state-of-the-art, remote mountaintop recording compound, surrounded by 12,000 acres of game lands, where artists could reside and become absorbed in their projects.
So what has he come up with here? On one hand, there are no out and out musical experiments on “As a Bird of the Air...” Reed has not shunned either his knack for melody or his excellent instrumental skills. He decided to see what sound combinations he could extract from the likes of late Tom Petty, The Church, and Echo & The Bunnymen. Essentially how you can bring the 80’s guitar sound into this century. His guitar playing particularly excels on tracks like “Twisted World”.
What Reed has come up with is one of those slow-growing albums that unveil their good sides the more you play them. Is he going back to the mountains for his next one?
