Andrew Bird is upon us and it’s like Christmas all over again (and to be honest, we needed another go at it after his last time through). Two years removed from his phenomenal Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs, Bird and collaborator Martin Dosh are returning this March with Armchair Apocrypha. There’s good reason to get excited; the disc is, song-for-song, coming remarkably close to meeting the high bar set by Eggs. Take lead single “Heretics,” which finds Bird at the peak of his charm, dark wit and swirling strings firmly in place.

As with many Bird tracks, it starts off simply enough: a basic guitar line and slow high hat. Before you know it, though, Bird and Dosh are careening off, layering violins, whistles, guitars, and drums, and reaching to pull them back in just as fast. The drums are especially fun here: Dosh may not be pulling out anything terribly complicated, but it’s nonetheless exciting when he doubles up the beats for that charging chorus. For his part, Bird goes dark, with images of incrimination and torture; as usual his references are oblique and he’s far from painting a clear picture. Still, he nails the general mood of dejection with that refrain of “thank God it’s fatal / not shy / not shy of fatal.”

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