My Favorite Albums of 2014

Lights Out / Bishop Allen

Just when I was starting to feel sad that there hasn't been a new Bishop Allen album since 2009's Grrr -- lo and behold, the guys have come out with a new one, Lights Out.  Memo to self:  Do everything you can do to help promote under-the-radar bands like these, the antidote to the Justin-Bieberized mass-market conglomerate that is slowly strangling modern music.

But I digress.

Besides my well-documented penchant for pop singers with glasses, there's a lot to love here. Bishop Allen may have started out documenting the neuroses of first-date jitters, but on this album they've moved into fruitful new territory:  the neuroses of keeping a long-term relationship going. If it's not quite yet #Music for Grown-ups, it's getting close.

Justin Rice's flat-tish vocals convey such a weariness with modern life, played against the uptempo jangle of the background.  (Dig how back in the mix they keep those baffled vocals.)  Those repeated "if's" tell us what a crossroads he's reached.  She's misunderstood, he's sorry, but at some point he has to stop apologizing.  "If I could give you the keys to the kingdom, I would," he offers, but she seems to have moved past that. "Start again" doesn't mean a fresh start for these two, it means her veering off to begin a new life -- and at some point, that begins to sound like a relief for him.

Smart as they are, these guys don't go overboard with the poetic lyrics, but there's still some deft songcraft, as in the sustained film imagery of "Play the song, roll the credits / Let it fade to black / Out of script, out of time, / And the scene is done." Sometimes all it takes is a repeated word:  "Call a car, call a friend / If you can, call anyone." (Reminds me of John Hiatt's wrenching "What Do We Do Now?" -- "should we call the kids or call the cops?")

Subtlety like this is in short supply these days, and yet these guys produce it track after track. Nuanced songs like "Black Hole" ("all those years collapse in the tiniest of shrugs"), "Skeleton Key" ("Let the gates from their hinges swing with your skeleton key"), and the deceptively simple "Breadcrumbs" ("The only thing you ever leave me is breadcrumbs / The only place they never lead me is home") -- the finely calibrated wit goes on and on.

Musically, it's agreeably straightforward, which I also dig -- who says you have to wow everybody with your multi-world-hyper-sophisticated musicality?  (Vampire Weekend, I'm watching you.)  Sometimes all you need is a cool smart friend to lament your life woes with. Bishop Allen provides that service. I'm so happy they're still here.

"Dimmer" / Bishop Allen

It must have been 5 years ago now that the carpenter working on our apartment told me I had to get hold of Bishop Allen's debut album, Bishop Allen -- and just as he promised, our kids (pre-teens, then) loved it as much as we did. Of course, since then the kids have grown into indie-snob teenagers who wouldn't be caught dead listening to the same music as their parents. Oh, it's okay if we put Vampire Weekend on our iPods, so long as they get explicit credit for having found the band first. But admit that they actually like Robyn Hitchcock or Elvis Costello or Paul Weller or Nick Lowe -- those "old guys" who just happen to still be releasing records -- no way. They get apoplectic when I "out" them in front of their friends for having loads of Kinks and Beatles on their playlists.

So I imagine we will have to pretend that they were the ones who first heard about Bishop Allen. After all, these guys live in hipster Brooklyn, sell their music directly from their own website, challenged themselves to an EP-a-month project in 2006, and were featured in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. What better indie creds could you have?

A few days ago I was fretting over the opacity of the Shins' lyrics; Justin Rice and Christian Rudder, the two Harvard classmates who are the core of Bishop Allen, are too smart to think that incomprehensibility equals intelligence. There's enough riddling allusions in their songs, but at least you can tell what's going on. At the moment my favorite song on this new album Grrr... (released March 10) is something called "Tiger, Tiger," but since my preferences change hourly, let's talk about the album's opening track, a winsome little meditation on identity and impermanences that's easily available on their website.

"Am I dimmer every day?" Rice blurts out (I love songs that start right away with just a vocal), in that distinctively plaintive voice. "Am I just a little glimmer /Like a tiny bobbing head /Of an ocean swimmer?" That receding image, with its suggestion of drowning, nails the mild growing panic of this song. "Olly olly oxen free," he yelps: "Can you see me?"

So where is he disappearing from? It might be a love affair that's inexorably petering out; it might be Bush-era paranoia about having no political weight; it could be intimations of mortality. (Somehow I suspect these guys have read their Wordsworth.) Whatever it is, they're willing to go surreal with it: Verse two wonders, "Do I slowly get erased /As I slowly eat my dinner?, and verse three frets, "Am I shrinking, am I shrinking? /Can you recognize my thoughts? /Do you care what I am thinking?" For whatever reason, he's starting to feel faceless and inconsequential. Doncha just hate it when that happens?

Still, he's got hope -- the boppy pop melody is too cheery for despair. The motor of light drums and guitar, with some goofball marimbas in the middle-eight and flourishes of strings, signals irrepressible optimism. In the bridge, he accepts his role as a rebel misfit, with a metaphorical horse race going on: "I would choose the darkest horse /That's the horse I'd ride." Being the long shot makes his eventual victory all the sweeter, of course. ("You wouldn't need binoculars /You'd see it with your own two eyes.") And in the fourth verse, he wraps it up by imagining, "You see me now /But it takes a lot of squinting." Well, at least that's something.

I just read a review that described Bishop Allen's music as "Kinksian." Gadzooks, I thought -- am I that predictable? And now I see, it's so obvious -- the shade of campiness in Rice's vocals, the unorthodox instruments, the la-la-la embellishments, the deeply tuneful melodic line. But hey, comparing something to the Kinks just means that the writer thinks the songcraft is dead solid, and indeed it is.

Of course, once my kids hear that this sounds like the Kinks, they may not listen to Bishop Allen anymore -- not publicly, that is. Sshhhhh, don't let them know.

Dimmer sample

"Little Black Ache" / Bishop Allen

And here's another sly bunch of popsters waiting in limbo for the success they deserve. Bishop Allen is a quirky Brooklyn-based indie band -- the songwriting duo Justin Rice and Christian Rudder, college friends, who have been accumulating more collaborators with each (tiny) increment of success. These prolific guys actually cranked out an EP every month throughout 2006, a completely mad undertaking that finally began to get them a fan base and some press notice. (And I thought the Baskervilles' one-single-a-month project was ambitious!)

At the end of all that, Bishop Allen released last July a new CD, The Broken String, which has generated molto buzz; I've just picked it up. But this track is from Charm School, their 2003 debut effort. Charm School has a stripped-down sort of D.I.Y. charm, like it was cooked up in a railroad flat with a bathtub in the kitchen. These guys sound like people you'd know -- maybe the guy in the next cubicle at work, the one with the pasty complexion and skinny jeans and thrift-store tweed jacket.

In fact, this song is a lot like The Baskerville's "Prowl" that I wrote about last night -- the urban singles scene, the slightly unhinged narrator, the crisp hooky beat.

Tonight's loser is hapless indeed: "Chasing my excuses to the end of the night / Tried to make a friend but it ended with a fight / I don't know why and I don't know when / But my keys have found a way to lock me out again." This is almost Buster Keaton territory, and the strained warble of the lead vocal makes it even funnier. "Sleeping on the subway in my interview tie," he goes on (I love that image), "Wander through the rain, sit and wonder why / Haven't got a plan, I haven't got a clue / I only got one lonely thing that's gonna see me through. "

Now here comes the chorus, a jaunty call and response (and listen for that synthesized echo snuck in as well): "I got my little black ache (won't fade) / What you got? / I got my little black ache (won't fade) / What you got? / I got my little black ache (won't fade) / What you got? / My little black ache won't fade." Pitiful as it is, it's also true -- we love our own neuroses, don't we? And sometimes they're the only company we have. ("I know I had some friends, I can almost hear their names," he whines later on.)

Against all odds, he seems to score when he stumbles into a bar: "Lovely little girl, crowded little place / I swear on this old Bible that I've never seen her face." But of course he blows it -- "She talks like I know what she's talking about / So where's this door that's got to let me out." Yep, that's panic's plenty familiar too.

Charm School is one of those albums I instinctively liked the first time I heard it, and I only learned about it because someone I met cared enough to recommend it. Let's all vow to recommend likeable new bands to each other, as soon as we learn about them. Give the new guys a chance!