Category Archives: music

Bishop Allen’s 2006 EPs

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In 2006, Bishop Allen released an EP for each month, titled (appropriately) January, February, …, November, December. They were selling for $6 a pop, and at least for the first several months, came hand addressed to you, with stamp, which is kind of cool. 11 of the EPs had 4 songs each, and the August EP had 13 live tracks (of which some songs were previously unreleased). I liked Charm School, and I liked the idea of a band putting stuff out regularly, so I bought all 12 over the course of the last 15 months or so. I've finally got them all, and have listened to them all, and I can compile here a kind of best of from the year of EPs.

My 2006 Bishop Allen Best-Of

  • Corazon (January)
  • Queen of the Rummage Sale (February)
  • Central Booking (February)
  • Flight 180 (April)
  • Chinatown Bus (May)
  • The Same Fire (June)
  • Walk on By (July)
  • The Monitor (Live – August)
  • The Flood (Live – August)
  • Fireflies (September)
  • Tea for Two (November)
  • Last Chance America (December)

You may notice nothing from March or October is on the list, although "The Monitor" first appears on March, before the live version I like on August. Those are simply my twelve favorites. Along with that, I need to nominate 2 dogs: "Black Suburbans", which is pretty awful, and "Abe Lincoln", which mostly sounds like filler from Charm School and then suddenly ends with a crack at Ronald Reagan that the rest of the song hadn't earned.

I figure an average of 1 good song per 4 song EP is pretty good, really, and while they had some processing and shipping delays, people who wanted to get the music right away could always have paid an extra $1 to download the songs as soon as they were announced.

Still, grain of salt here, some people don't much like Bishop Allen, and if you didn't like Charm School, there isn't really anything the EPs that would make me try to convince you to give them another look. If anything, I'd say their sound is pretty coherent, but of course, we're talking about 13 releases in 2 years, so you wouldn't expect a ton of variety in that span.

More later this week on Baian the Assassin 2-4.

One from the vault

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Bless You
Bless You
The Court & Spark

Bless You is one of the Court and Spark's very earliest records (is Ventura Whites earlier? it sounds earlier) and I was surprised to hear of its existence. After all, I had Witch Season and Dead Diamond River and Hearts, so I thought I was doing pretty good. It wasn't until I was reading the article about them on Last.fm that I discovered their two early albums, and I was surprised by an Amazon review that declared this their best album ever, since surely it couldn't be better than Witch Season. But I was plenty excited to get it anyway, and when I put it in, boy, was I pleased.

While Witch Season is a little more up-tempo than Bless You, it doesn't really outshine the record in terms of energy, because a lot of the instrumentation in Bless You is somewhere between intense and frantic, especially some of the lead guitar work. The drums are also way up in the mix, which gives the slower beat a little more emotion.

But of course, with the Court and Spark, it's the songs that carry the day, not the arrangement. I submit that if you don't like "Rooster Mountain," we probably cannot be friends. Ditto "National Lights."

Actually, I probably don't proselytize enough for the Court and Spark, so I should point out here that some of my all time top 100 songs are scattered across the handful of C&S disks that I have. Check out "Suffolk Down Upon The Night," "Out on the Water," "Sundowner, You," "Berliners," "Titov Sang the Blues," and more. Like.. now. Check them out right now.

What I am enjoying on the Monday afternoon before (American) Thanksgiving

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Last night, I was packing up my room, and I reached for a CD to put on more or less at random, and I hit on The Weakerthans album Reconstruction Site. I picked it up some time ago, surprised that there was a third Weakerthans record, and I listened to it once, and I thought to myself, “Yep, this is the Weakerthans,” but really, it’s a better album than that, and it deserves to be mentioned on its own.

The problem for me is that the Weakerthans isn’t a band I went out and discovered on my own. Fallow was a birthday present in 2001 from a very special girl, and for me, the Weakerthans have always been associated with her in my mind. Nevermind that I love Fallow and Left and Leaving in their own right, they just aren’t a Judah band. They will probably always be at least half K in my mind, and after we stopped seeing each other, I stopped following them. I don’t know where I got the impression that they had stopped making music, but eventually I did find Reconstruction Site and pick it up.

I imagine that they aren’t for everyone. They’re very polished, like a Teenage Fanclub, and not particularly edgy on first listen, so there are a lot of people I just wouldn’t recommend them to. But I also can’t really imagine anyone listening to an album carefully and at the end, deciding that they just don’t like them. There’s just too much substance to dismiss.

A short recommendation: Fading Trails

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Magnolia Electric Co. released Fading Trails this year, and I picked it up a week or so ago. I liked Songs: Ohia, but the transition to Magnolia Electric has really been… well, it isn’t that there was anything wrong with Songs, but let’s just say that Magnolia Electric resonates with me more. Fading Trails is as good as or better than the other studio album, What Comes After the Blues, and will probably be one of the most frequently played albums of the next three or four months for me, unless The Wrens manage to get their next album out in that time, which I do not expect.

The record is only 9 songs and 28 minutes long, both of which surprised me when I looked them up just a second ago, because it certainly feels like an entire album to me. My two immediate favorites are the leading track Don’t Fade On Me and the number three track, Lonesome Valley, and then I find the timbre change as one recording session gives way to another a little disconcerting, but the songs in the middle and on the back half of the record are good too.

Pick it up.