We are going to the Fun Fun Fun Fest this upcoming weekend like most of you guys are. This week, we will be talking about some of the people we are most excited to see and one of those is Bishop Allen. We hear a lot of buzz about The National and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and it’s warranted, but the thing is that this would be the 5th time we will be seeing The National and the second for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which by the way, is one too many times for CYHSY. We will be talking about them later. For now, it’s about Bishop Allen and how much we love them and how we feel they are getting no love from other Austin publications. So luckily for us, we wrote about them two months ago because… well just because we liked them. So we are just going to do the good old fashion cut and paste here. Listen to the tracks, they are so worth your time at the festival.
Lately we have been infatuated with Brooklyn’s Bishop Allen, and we thought we would tell you guys why. First, let’s talk about the band itself. Justin Rice and Christian Rudder formed the band in 2003 and took the name from the street they lived on while attending Harvard. In 2003, they released Charm School and recorded all of the instruments on the entire album by themselves. They later had an EP project in which they released an EP every month for the entire year of 2006.
Now let’s talk about their newest album, The Broken String, which isn’t all that new. It was actually released in July of 2007 on the Dead Oceans label. Why is it that we never heard of them until earlier this year, you may ask? Easy — we aren’t that cool. We really love their album because it’s just about everything we love in an indie pop album — catchy melodies and fun lyrics, the kind of music you play when you go out to catch some sun at Barton Springs. Another thing we love about this album is that some of the tracks seem to have a lot of influences from some of our other favorite artists. One track in particular is “The Chinatown Bus.” The song sounds a lot like Simon and Garfunkel, a classic. Also, “Shrinking Violet” sounds a little like The Acorn… also another of our favorites. This isn’t to say that we only like Bishop Allen because they sound like other artists we like, but what we are trying to say is that they embody a lot of the best things in indie pop. We only hope that we will be seeing Bishop Allen sometime soon along Red River.
Bishop Allen – Click, Click, Click, Click
Bishop Allen – Rain
Bishop Allen – The Chinatown Bus
JF
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