Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I’ve been watching the music industry implode under the weight of its own b.s. for awhile now, amazing how the playing field has been leveled in some ways and is more uneven than ever in others. There’s a band out of Brooklyn, Bishop Allen, that is doing some very interesting things, not only from an artistic standpoint but also from a marketing one. In 2006 they made history of some sort by releasing twelve four-song EPs, one each month. Some of those tracks, as well as some new ones, have made it onto THE BROKEN STRING, their second proper long play release. The result is an eclectic selection of tunes that hang well together.

Bishop Allen is effectively a duo consisting of Christian Rudder and Justin Rice, rounded out by a revolving cast of friends. The band eschews volume for eclecticness, for the most part, so you’ve got all sorts of different instruments bopping in and out of songs, which are wonderfully different and even weird, but more in the Krazy Kat sense than Ren and Stimpy. So you’ve got “Click Click Click Camera” about a picture taking at a wedding. It’s a happy little thing, which contrasts with the quietly disconcerting “Flight 180.” Then you’ve got a perfectly addicting little up-tempo tune titled “Rain,” heavier on the quiet than on the loud, that uses, near the end, one of those kiddy-type pianos that are always so irritating in the middle of the afternoon, but you never take them away from the kid because you don‘t want to discourage him from being the next Elton John or something (well, you don‘t really want him to turn out exactly like Elton John, but you know what I mean). Bishop Allen is a band that respects its audience and can draw them it from a wide demographic range. I ’m somewhat put in the mind of The Left Banke in spots, probably due to the absence for the most part of electric guitars and the reliance on keyboards and chamber instruments. Bishop Charles is hardly a conventional group, however. Check this out. There’s this really weird, really wonderful tune titled “Shrinking Violet,” with a fucking banjo and a horn kind of playing against each other but somehow improbably sounding perfect together. I mean, who even thinks doing something like that? Bishop Charles does, and does it really well. And the band can rock, and demonstrably so. They just choose not to, for the most part, though “Middle Management” on THE BROKEN STRING demonstrates that they can, when they want to. Just to put things back on their own quiet track, they follow “Middle Management up with “Choose Again,” a low-key piano and vocal tune, and “News From Your Bed,” which could just as easily have been an outtake from the Sopwith Camel’s HELLO HELLO CD.

The overall feeling I got from listening to THE BROKEN STRING was that I had this great, great band named Bishop Allen sitting in my living room (or car, or office), with the volume of their instruments turned way down, playing just for me. I haven’t heard that degree of intimacy conveyed via a CD in quite a while. It doesn’t get much better than this.