My other CITU&SIO columns thus far have been very high-profile (at least in our world, natch) releases with quite a bit of collective attention from the blogosphere, and my assessments more or less jived with the general consensus. Enter Bishop Allen & The Broken String, the sophomore LP from this prolific group of Harvard alums that grabbed me from play #1.
Bishop Allen spent 2006 working out the kinks of being a pop band by releasing a EP of new material every month last year, and while none was perfect, all were better than average and several certifiable gems can be mined from that 12-month project. That’s kind of the idea behind The Broken String – a “best of” retrospect of the 2006 windfall. Don’t expect the typical trappings of a greatest-hits type affair though – The Broken String would stand on its own as a follow-up to the band’s well-crafted 2003 debut, Charm School. Such careful and calculated efforts to avoid the “sophomore slump” can have its own pitfalls, though - recording in excess of 50 songs in a year certainly gave Bishop Allen a chance to work the kinks out, but also opened the group up to scrutiny that most young bands don’t have to face: not only will the LP be critiqued as release, but the selection process of the material from the EPs will also be heavily scrutinized. Reworkings of songs like “Flight 180,” which featured raw, wavering strings on the April EP, caught flack from the likes of Pitchfork for adding grandiose orchestration on the LP version. Well, yeah – when you’re paying (via time, money, or both) to record a new EP’s worth of material every month, the arrangements are going to be more sparse. Duh.
Bottom line is that The Broken String is a fantastic album of universally appealing songwriting. My mom would like it, I’d send it to my Gramps for Christmas, and I’ll play it loud and proud as a I cruise the snobbish streets of Chicago’s hip ‘hoods. Frankly, I like the EP versions of these songs but I more than appreciate the band’s ability to tastefully build upon those recordings on The Broken String, like a real estate developer who is able to respectfully rework the beautiful bones of a building to function in new capacity.
2 responses so far ↓
tankboy // Aug 21, 2007 at 1:59 pm
And I’m still holding out that everyone else gets clued into “Rain” as THE jam of the Summer ‘07!
Listless in 2007: The best of the best | No Dessert For You // Dec 21, 2007 at 1:06 pm
[…] Bishop Allen/The Broken String (Secretly Canadian) - To me, this is the most special record of the year because it grabbed me from the first listen and I’ve yet to tire of it. That’s what’ll happen when you spend a year “practicing” the making of records before you actually cull together an album. Indie pop rock at its most thoughtful and nearly flawless. […]
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