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The Bishop Allen & the Broken String
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The Bishop Allen & the Broken String
Current price: $15.99
Barnes and Noble
The Bishop Allen & the Broken String
Current price: $15.99
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All that woodshedding sure paid off for
. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Boston quartet undertook an ambitious one-EP-a-month project in 2006, self-releasing a staggering 58 songs over that time. Despite no label or publicist and the modest arrangements of the material, the blogosphere picked up the PR slack, eventually earning the band kudos from
and
, among others.
ups the ante considerably, reworking ten songs from the EP cycle and two new cuts into lustrous
notable for its versatility, clever lyrics, and offbeat instrumentation. The songs suggest a host of touchstones, from the
drama of a scaled-back
and can't-miss hooks of
to
-like wordplay and narrative flights a la
. Songwriters
may not quite scale those heights, but in the hybrid they've come up with something nearly as intoxicating.
opens the record with
contrasting the Civil War ironclad and sailors' courage with playing on-stage. It's an audacious conceit, but the song's slow-burn build into cascading piano runs, symphonic percussion, and joyous choruses makes it more elegiac than pretentious. That song bleeds into the metronomic guitar riffs and driving
beat of
setting the table for the diversity that follows.
with its infectious bouncing-ball beat and nylon-stringed guitar runs, is surely coming to a Kodak commercial soon, while
turns from twangy shuffle to Caribbean-flavored
, the marimbas, glockenspiel, and muted trumpet making for a delightful mini-vacation.
's gentle vocal turn on
is an effective mid-record change of pace and a rare instance in
where you'll find a saxophone and ukulele cohabitating. Even the brief vignette
and its oboe/banjo counterpoint is another example of
's imaginative arrangements. Just about the only misstep is
a straight-ahead
tune more suited to the band's debut,
-- it's not a bad song, but the bar's been set much higher everywhere else on
. ~ John Schacht