Birdy Lets Her Hair Down In ‘Beautiful Lies’

A 10-second slice from any of the tracks on “Beautiful Lies” will quickly point to a very clear conclusion: Birdy has grown to become nearly unrecognizable. Her newest album does weave in traces of influence from her early sound, but its clear focus is on Birdy’s breaking through the sphere of indie-folk ballads and experimenting with elements from the foreign realm of indie-pop. The result is a huge creative leap forward and the finest display of her talents to date. Through “Beautiful Lies,” Birdy affirms that the days of her sweet yet safe cover of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” are long gone and that what lies ahead in her career is a more gorgeously complex and daringly individual sound.

Back in 2011, the then-14-year-old Birdy’s first offerings were charming enough. Her covers, accompanied by piano, easily lent themselves to monotony but were gracefully buoyed by the spellbinding innocence of her high-pitched, quivering voice. In “Beautiful Lies”, her vocal color has changed to a shocking degree: Birdy has traded her sweet, childlike warble for a drastically deeper, richer tone. “Keeping Your Head Up” is a track that epitomizes her transformation. Its mesh of thundering bass, electronica, and synth would have swallowed the old Birdy whole, but the fullness of her voice now proves more than capable of powering through the track’s heavy production. Whereas the climax in 2011’s “Skinny Love” featured a wavering vocal tremble that was earnest but strained and uneven, the bridge in “Keeping Your Head Up” presents Birdy in complete command of a haunting, pristinely smooth vibrato. The transition to this new musical style appears to pose no problem for her; she sounds as though she is perfectly in her element.

More than a stunning display of stylistic expansion, “Beautiful Lies” is a remarkable album thematically. The span of Birdy’s career has seen her development from sampling the styles of other musicians in her early covers as a wide-eyed adolescent to penning her own lyrics as a confident young woman. So it would have been easy to make the album a bombastic display of victory and strength, but that isn’t the case at all. Though the album as a whole still certainly showcases Birdy’s burgeoning creativity and confidence, there is also a very careful harmony between the bold (“You know that I’m not done yet / there’s still a fight in me left” from “Silhouette”) and the disquieting (“You’re in the clear/while I'm waking up to nothing but tears” from “Words”). The balance contextualizes each track to make sense of the album’s overarching theme: daring to power through some of life’s inevitably darker moments.

“Beautiful Lies” is generally thoughtful, with lines such as “Love shouldn’t cost a thing/ Tell me why I’m paying for everything” and “ Save yourself my darling/ Just be gone by morning”—both from “Save Yourself.” However, the lyrics are not without their flaws. In certain individual tracks, there is an irksome incompatibility between the message and the atmosphere created by the music. For instance, “Hear You Calling” features infectious synth beats and almost aggressively cheerful major chords; lyrically, however, the track is meant to be an aching meditation on the loss of a loved one. This kind of disconnect unfortunately happens often and proves to be the album’s major weakness. Nonetheless, such a stumble does not drastically undermine Birdy’s achievement in creating “Beautiful Lies,” and the poignancy of some of her early original phrases in her new album suggests nothing but an upward trajectory for her lyricism.