It’s possible- if you try- to imagine David Bowie coming of age in some alternate reality. Granted, Bowie’s made enough alternate realities of his own, but it’s possible (barely) to speculate that in some galaxy Bowie was trained on the California coffee shop circuit, maybe during the dot-com boom. Instead of gender bending bombast and intergalactic swagger, he’d have stuck with his birth name David R. Jones and lyrically tread the relationship path with a dash of technical daring. He’d be able to use all the mixing tricks of the modern age, adding self-backed choruses and claps of sound that have no discernable real world origin, while never forgetting the visceral draw of rock. And, eventually, all the vapor from that Chai might have cleared his sinuses a bit, raising his voice from a seductive drip to, well, the voice of Bobby Birdman.
Naturally, any analogy to Bowie constitutes high grade musical sacrilege. It could be like throwing a rock through a stained glass window to make such a premature analogy. Still, listen to Bobby Birdman and you can’t help but help but hear an acolyte. His eerie song “Be Warned” has some ominous overtones that sound very Bowie (the song is, after all, called “Be Warned”), and at the same time it maintains constant attention to holding a hummable tune over a dissonant background. Instruments rev idly in the distance and whistles switch like the world’s most pleasant sound check. But Birdman consistently anchors the song with his vocals.
Birdman’s real standouts, however, come when he uses all the technology at his disposal to create folk with a steroid shot of texture. “I’ve Been Away (For Too Long)” is a calyptic rock and roller that matches the most layered sounds of Wilco with the deep work of Brian Wilson (during a pill-popping hiatus). Listen to the creaking in the background of “I’ve Been Away (For Too Long)” and you can’t help but hear the chomping grind in Wilson’s “Vega-Tables”. Birdman matches Wilson quirk for quirk, right up to the mid-song celebration of Giraffes, which, on the idiosyncrasy scale, ranks about as high as singing about produce.
But Birdman doesn’t suffer from childish throwback lyrics- his weirdness has a concept behind it. His latest full album, “Giraffes and Jackals” is based on the duality of how people act- a high concept idea that says sometimes we are the rational Giraffe and other times we turn into the fierce Jackal. Birdman’s grounded in the concept of what he’s saying as well as how he’s producing it. In his earlier work, this led to the occasional over-reliance on experimental quirks. “Love Be Long” is a track Birdman claims was recorded during a bike ride around Portland. Whether that’s true or not is debatable, but the songs are as good as you’d expect music recorded during a bike ride around Portland to sound. That isn’t saying much.
Fortunately, Birdman’s far past that kind of low-fi parlor trick. He creates textured songs that experiment without getting lost inside their own net of tricks. “I Will Come Again” is an example of his newer work- it’s a bouncy mix of sounds as fun and colorful as a ball crawl. It’s music that’s good outside of the box of folk, pop, or rock- it’s just good music. Maybe the comparison between Birdman and Bowie is overly ambitious. The biggest similarity is their voices. But along with those meshing vocal chords, Birdman and Bowie share the resolve to make music that’s good on its own terms. 
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