Baby Bird / Ugly Beautiful by Josh Aderholt Atlantic Records Baby Bird has made me a poor man. The Stephen Jones-all-alone-with-a-four-track-recorder project known as Baby Bird has released five, thousand-print limited edition albums worth of some four hundred songs Jones recorded between 1988 and 1994. Baby Bird the five man band released Ugly Beautiful last year in the UK. I've been paying through the nose to get the imports I've got and spending hours on the Web looking for the ones I haven't. But it's worth it. I haven't loved like this since I discovered The Beatles in the fifth grade. Yes, it's been tough love, but that looks to be changing as Baby Bird has been picked up by stateside Atlantic Records and released its US debut, Ugly Beautiful. Essentially the same as the UK version, give a song, take a song and change a few, Ugly Beautiful is not Brit-Pop. Where Oasis proudly mimics The Beatles and even increasingly progressive Radiohead unabashedly quotes the Fab Four, Baby Bird challenges a British pop band to "do something that isn't The Beatles." Claiming no musical influences, Jones maintains his music is inspired by the films of Hal Harltey and Jim Jarmusch and aspires to write film scores. Many of the tracks on Baby Bird's self-released demos seem to reflect this interest -- without structure and with few words, Jones uses loops and samples (usually from film or television, not music) to create a feel as captivating as the best trip hop, while standing apart from the genre by virtue of his lack of heavy bass or R&B influence. Ugly Beautiful is decidedly poppier than Baby Bird's four-track demos. About a quarter of the tracks are pure pop, while the rest resemble Jones' brand of trip hop described above, structurally, while adding a vocal core, losing none of the ambient appeal and becoming more emotionally resonant. The album is virtually flawless -- consistently infectious, hummable, and almost sinister. "You're Gorgeous," the first UK single, went to #1 in Britain and charted all over Europe; no one seemed to mind that it was about exploitation and fashion photography, and is pretty sick if you think about it. The second UK single plays with a hackneyed device, asking "are you Jesus without nails ... are you Paris without snails," and so on -- kinda cute, kinda not, but undeniably interesting. Yes, folks, Baby Bird is witty: "I wanna get famous just so I can get sued;" "I'm too handsome to be homeless;" "got a girl in bed, when I took it further / where Jamaica? No I coaxed her. Ha! Ha!" Baby Bird has a million of them. Baby Bird is naughty: "Jesus ain't a man, he's my girlfriend;" "It's time to come down from Your spire / Jesus come back you're a liar;" "we give you children / but we won't make you come." Yes, Jones can turn a phrase, but what makes Baby Bird special is that it is completely sincere. For all the wit and bile, Baby Bird is never cheeky. Whether Jones is singing about a man's love for his chain of convenience stores in "Cornershop," repeating that "Jesus is my girlfriend," or crooning to an honest-to-god baby bird, he means it. He is not kidding around. Baby Bird has this ugly-beautiful, disturbed love song thing, this almost-agenda that it follows with religious devotion. Baby Bird's liner notes and lyrics have a remarkablely consistent vision for all its superficial inanity and diversity. Whatever Stephen Jones and Baby Bird are doing, they believe it, and sound damned good doing it. Baby Bird is religion for me, but is it for the masses? Jones thinks so, insisting that "even my brother [likes it], and he likes Sting and George Benson." Hell, I heard "You're Gorgeous" on the radio in Russia this summer. But America? Ugly Beautiful came out two weeks ago and I have yet to hear any radio play. Baby Bird could change the complexion of pop music and all of our lives if it can break through the American wasteland of ska-lite and insipid R&B. I think I'm saved but I need a witness.

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