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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.