Release Date: Jul 24, 2007
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Dead Oceans
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy The Broken String from Amazon
All that woodshedding sure paid off for Bishop Allen. 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 NPR and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Cute. Brainy. Competent. Unremarkable. It’s tough to put your finger on exactly why Bishop Allen’s sophomore release, The Broken String, fails to arouse — the sound is homey, the playing facile and the lyrics keen but not overly precious. Yet for me, all it inspires is indifference. Maybe I.
is available now