Despite the hopeful title of Bishop Allen's 2003 debut Charm School, a formal education wasn't enough to ingratiate these Harvard grads to the wider public. Forced to choose the autodidactic route instead, the band appealed to the marketing potential of the online indie rock fan-o-sphere. During 2006, the group released one EP per month, both to keep their name afloat in blogs and trend pieces, and also as a Web 2.0 version of the Beatles' Hamburg residency-- honing their chops through consistent production and performance. A bit more than seven months after completing that project, the band offers Bishop Allen and the Broken String, featuring nine reworked EP tracks and three new songs, with more than a bit of studio polish to boot.
The songs chosen for String reveal Paul Simon as Bishop Allen's patron saint, at times to a degree that makes the record feel like an homage. The paean to photography "Click Click Click Click" (from the July EP) is a first-cousin to Simon's winsome "Kodachrome", and "Corazon" (January) is another ode to an anthropomorphized tool of creativity, in this case a discarded piano. String's colorful narratives of naïve sightseeing represent the band's debt to the singer/songwriter most clearly, however. "Like Castanets" (September) takes the vantage point of a traveler making sense of his Chilean surroundings; one need not know what Assumption Day is (or, for that matter, "Armistice Day") to revel in the ambience that comes with it. On "The Chinatown Bus", a bit of Greyhound flanerie directly drawn from Simon's "America", Justin Rice's lyrical cadence closely resembles "The Boxer".
For a record bound with such dog-eared nostalgia, "The Monitor" is an appropriate preamble. Situating the monstrous Civil War sea battle the titular ship fought with the Merrimac in relation to his own vocation, Rice marvels at the soldiers' occupational devotion: "And none of them knew or none of them cared how much had just changed right then and right there. They just carried on." Relying on the repetition of day-to-day labor to outpace external obstacles is indeed a fitting (if not a bit glossed) conceit for a band that punched the clock for a solid year to gain some stability of its own. Once they'd righted the ship, "Monitor", originally a drum and bass brood from the March EP, was rewarded with its own dynamic ironsides in the studio; the multiple layers of rolling, echoed piano on the String version result in a much stronger and dramatic work.
Yet while a bit of sheen works fine for some of String, the band gets a bit carried away at points, reaching a point of diminishing returns on the lovely "Corazon", for instance, on which the addition of a slick, punchy bassline and handclaps detracts from the original's sense of unguarded wonder. "Flight 180", which parallels the deterioration of a relationship through a slowly-rendered plane crash, replaces the April EP version's unadorned, nervous strings with sheets of cascading orchestration, a big-budget remake of that song's bleak simplicity.
The most obvious remnants of Bishop's power-pop past are the new songs "Rain" and "Middle Managegment", both of which have been floating around in demo and live form for a few years. An amalgam of handclaps, limber guitar lines, toy piano and time-worn silver-lining lyricism ("Cause if it's ever gonna get any better, it's gotta get worse for a day"), "Rain" is an strutting reminder of Wilco's "War on War", and evidence of a possible strong suit for the band. The inclusion of "Management" is less successful, however; the band is more suited to the piano pop of closer "The News from Your Bed" than what sounds like a banged-out pop-punk sitcom theme.
Like Voxtrot's full-length May debut, The Broken String is an attempt to introduce a band mostly known for a run of EPs to a wider audience, by showcasing the breadth of their abilities with the benefit of label support and production sparkle. While the record is far from a failure, Bishop Allen's studio revisionism also falls short of offering anything substantially new to much of the EP material. As with Voxtrot, String is packed with the sort of potential that might result in something substantial down the line, once the group wrangles its outsize ambition and fleshes out its innate charisma. Bishop Allen's popularity thus far has resulted from an excess of patience; give them a bit more time to show what they've really got.
