This past summer, Andrew Bird’s solo set wowed the crowd at the Calgary Folk Music Festival with adept whistling, virtuoso violin skills and a general sense of aplomb and expertise. However, the true fan’s moment of the weekend was at one of the workshops, when he stumbled five or six times with his loop pedal, vaguely amused and possibly stoned, trying to dynamically re-create the pizzicato barrage that underpins “Skin Is, My” from his second-last album. In spite of all his perfection and meticulousness, Bird is a musician — a composer — with a well-defined sense of playfulness and a willingness to risk embarrassment in front of a crowd, as long as it means getting that melody just so.

On Noble Beast, Bird’s fourth solo effort, this whimsical nature returns to the forefront. While 2007’s excellent Armchair Apocrypha didn’t exactly shelve the impulse, it was downplayed in favour of catchy, straightforward pop songs fleshed out with sweeping baroque hooks. The two albums have no lack of common points, one of the most important being the quick sell: the new record hits hard and fast.

With a solitary bongo slap, the sweeping strings and whistled melody that introduce “Oh No” give way to a softly plucked guitar that churns slowly but surely towards the song’s climax. On “Masterswarm,” Bird settles into a sultry Spanish groove that attempts to make listeners whistle along, offering sparse, beautiful trills that absolutely beg for harmonization. The singalong bid isn’t hurt by Bird’s lyrics, which have an annoying tendency to burn into your memory even on first listen.

This strong start is followed by a foursome of similarly excellent tracks, decidedly old-school Bird in tone but not shying away from the sweeping hugeness that made Apocrypha so instantly lovable. Then, at its midpoint, the album moves to a more adventurous, loop-centric series of instrumentals and full songs. Most notably, “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” starts with something that sounds like it could be one of Chad VanGaalen’s homemade drum-bots before disintegrating into a glitchy, multifaceted pastiche of distorted instrumentation and crisp vocals.

An otherwise strong album is slightly diminished by the fact that it feels slightly top-loaded. Compared to its opening sextet of instant classics, “The Privateers” is a bit bland, and in spite of an excellent start, closing track “Souverian” drags on about three minutes too long. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the album because of an indulgent edit and a slip in otherwise flawless sequencing. Noble Beast is a delightful addition to Bird’s catalogue.