Bishop Allen

Growing up is hard to do. Between its lauded 2003 debut, Charm School, and this year’s followup, The Broken String, Bishop Allen went through a very public adolescence. Throughout 2006, the Brooklyn quartet released an EP every month, logging nearly sixty songs for the year. This twelve-EP project generated plenty of buzz and yielded some fantastic tracks, but the process seems to have had a wonderfully painful and transformative effect on the band. While Broken String retains the lo-fi indie-pop aesthetics, clever lyrics and unshakable melodies of School, the group’s wide-eyed innocence and happy-go-lucky lilt are tempered both lyrically and musically by a world-weary melancholy that flirts with cynicism and ennui. This might sound like a real bummer, but — as anyone who’s ever watched a Godard film will tell you — cynicism and ennui are sexy, and those traits only make the grown-up Bishop Allen even more appealing. Who doesn’t love a charm-school dropout?