Bishop Allen “Corazon”
Starlight Mints “Sugar Blaster”

NYC rockers Bishop Allen are already darlings of the blogiverse; in fact I was turned on to them by the postings of the B.A. superfan at You Ain’t No Picasso. Two things hooked me on these guys: (1) 2006 finds them releasing an EP every month, the kind of ambitious project that impresses me; and (2) their song from January, “Corazon.”

So this post is (at least half) for those of you who haven’t heard the song yet. Still with me?

“Corazon” is at base a love song for a loser–addressed to a piano. I understand it’s a true story, and that the piano featured herein is its subject. Over a shuffling midtempo beat and trotting strums, singer J. Rice retells the adoption of the abandoned instrument.

It’s unwanted and on the side of the road. It’s a bitch to move. It can’t be fully fixed. And still it’s ultimately taken in: “I guess we’re tuning to you.”

I can’t travel back to my state of mind in January, but this is what I needed then, and it still hits me in a warm place. There’s such a deep well of sympathy in “Corazon,” an implied worldview that matches my own (and that I think we need more of, if that’s not too egoistic).

So Bishop Allen reclaim the obsolete; acknowledge that some things in this world seem to carry a life of their own; and declare that in the flawed we can find a small measure of perfection.

And “Corazon” accomplishes all of this without being, as I fear I have, heavy-handed. It’s a redemption song that keeps its scope small to best communicate bigger themes and heavier emotion. Even musically, as I believe has been pointed out elsewhere, Bishop Allen here skillfully underplay what could have been a Big Fat Sappy Melody so it comes out perfectly catchy, perfectly touching.

Oklahomans the Starlight Mints are at their best when they show less restraint. The Mints take a post-Beat 60s shag rock frame and blow it open with mind-expanded eccentricities learned from the Flaming Lips and Pixies. And they make it sound all their own. No mean feat, that.

I’ve hung with ‘em and enjoyed their music through this year’s Drowaton, but they’ve never really hit me as hard as they did the first time, on 2000’s The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of. Since then it sounds to me as though they’ve steadily grown more restrained and worked to the darker colors in their palette–I liked ‘em a little better when they had rainbows shooting out of their ears.

“Sugar Blaster,” off Stuff, bleeds childlike joy, fun that doesn’t feel forced. I don’t think enough bands know the value of a catchy drumbeat, and this tune opens with a textbook specimen.

From there we get a sugar rush of awesome ideas: sassy boy-girl chants; hand-claps vs. Kinks-y riff; lead vox doing call-and-response with instruments; ba-da-bas; blissfully sweet nonsense; a distant siren… And it all goes down clean, never feels overstuffed, right up to the wonderfully abrupt

stop.

Starlight Mints and Bishop Allen played the Troubadour Nov. 6.
January at BishopAllen.com. (and at iTunes.)
The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of at Newbury Comics. (What’s up, iTunes?)