Recap Andrew Bird at the Ogden Theatre, Feb. 26

When the lights went down and Andrew Bird walked to the middle of the stage of the Ogden Theatre last Thursday, it seemed reasonable to wonder whether the lauded songsmith would be able recreate live the complex and often symphonic sounds he produces in the studio. Considering the intricacy of Bird’s breakthrough album, 2007’s Airmchair Apocrypha, there were no guarantees—but the sold-out crowd at least ensured he had some willing ears to experiment on.

Plucking his violin pizzicato, as though it were a guitar, Bird opened with the spiritual “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning,” which was a great way to ground his set from the start. An old-fashioned gramophone spun wildly behind him as he briefly paused during the song to untie his shoes, take them off, and place them at the edge of the Oriental rug he stood upon. Even when his three-person band joined him for the second song, the members of the audience appeared unable to look at Bird with anything other than curious awe. Then, playing up his reputation as a masterful and at times superhuman multi-instrumentalist, Bird slung his guitar around his back while he veered between violin, vocals, and the bouncing-ball motion of his mallets softly plunking the xylophone.

As formidable as he was onstage, Bird’s mortal limitations began to show themselves as the set wore on. But even when the leader and his band fumbled the beginning of “Natural Disaster”—one of the highlights of Bird’s new and ironically less complicated Noble Beast—they instantly went into a brief hip-hop riff that Bird described, tongue in cheek, as “a Wu-Tang patch.” Looking disoriented to the point where he tripped over the instrument cables that had surrounded his feet all night, it was hard not to wonder if Bird was suffering from the high altitude’s effect on alcohol tolerance. While Bird did his best to breathe life into his studio work Thursday, in the end he came off looking like a bit like a trained sprinter attempting to run a marathon.