Andrew Bird’s 10th album, Armchair Apocrypha, is not as inventive as his first nine. Yeah, nine. But even as Bird breaks from the oddball influences of Irish and Appalachian fiddling, early jazz and Hungarian gypsy folk that helped define his previous albums – in favor of more conventionally melancholy, less percussively unplugged indie-pop – there are some details of the man’s music that remain just as unusual and completely his own. Bird can’t help but set himself apart, as he is steeped in subtle anomalies: brilliantly worded social criticisms and complex, one-man-band arrangements, combined with a masterfully maintained reliance on whistling and violins.

There are, however, moments where original detail is drowned out by too much background noise, too much synthetic filler and reverb where silence-backed pizzicato and self-shaped wind might emote more forcefully. To its credit, the background noise sometimes calls to mind the city lights and sirens, the flames and the chaos required for lyrics that prophesize about crashing planes and empires. And sometimes the silence is there – if only for a moment – before the electric guitars and drums come in and the build begins. On tracks like “”Darkmatter”” and the tumbling, seven-minute “”Armchairs,”” Bird’s build is exceptionally executed – a lull that follows that build and a build that follows this lull – and leaves a sort of waxing and waning hopefulness in his waxing and waning melodies, one that continues through the album’s remaining environmental warnings (“”Spare-Ohs””) and challenges to our modern value systems (“”Plasticities””).