Bishop Allen Break Their String Of DIY Discs

06/26/07 5:00pm

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

Making records in your bedroom may be an enlightening experience for some, but Brooklyn, New York's Bishop Allen recently reached a point where it was time to expand outside of their homes. After several years of independence, the band decided to shack up with a label — a choice that put them in bed with Dead Oceans, an arm of Secretly Canadian.

"We put out Charm School [the band's debut disc] and 12 smaller records all on our own," string man Christian Rudder explains. "And we could definitely feel that more people were listening to us and more people wanted to buy our records, and we started to feel the limitations of our own labour in that regard.

"We had taken the DIY thing as far as we could go with it because we were just too busy mailing out orders. We needed help. We needed someone with distribution."

Those 12 small records that Rudder refers to were part of an ambitious 2006 project he worked on with the other core band member, Justin Rice. Frustrated with their lack of progress on the follow-up to Charm School, the duo decided to write new material and release an EP in January. Happy with the way that disc turned out, the EP venture snowballed into a CD-per-month marathon.

"We just started writing totally new songs and threw out the batch that we were working with," Rudder says. "We decided we needed to kick-start ourselves.

"An EP is a lot less pressure than a full album. We did one and we were just like, 'Hey, let's try to do the whole year.'"

The 12 discs Bishop Allen released last year were all named after the month in which they were recorded, and all were four-song EPs except for a full-length live album in August.

While sacrificing studio bells and whistles would have kept most musicians away from such an endeavor, Rudder and Rice found themselves unexpectedly pleased with their rapid-fire home recordings.

"Definitely, quality was a concern," Rudder admits, "but they were only four songs each. There were a few moments on some of the songs where I thought, 'Man, we should have done that better,' or 'We shouldn't put that song on there.'

"But I'd say almost all of the material we really liked. That was part of the motivation for putting some of the songs on the new full-length. We had a bit more time to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's."

It was through the EP project that Rudder and Rice eventually found the inspiration for the second, soon-to-be-released, Bishop Allen full-length, The Broken String. The new album features 12 tracks, nine of which are reworked tracks from the 2006 EPs.

For the band, who have grown to include longtime collaborators Cully Symington (drums) and Darbie Nowatka (vocals), the label-supported recording experience was a major change from what they were accustomed to.

"We did about 10 hours worth of drums [in a studio] a long, long time ago for an album that never got released," Rudder recalls, "but this was by far the most comprehensive studio experience we've had. It was the only legitimate one, I'd say."

Bishop Allen take their newfound experience on the road this month and will make one stop in Canada at Toronto's Lee's Palace on Thursday.