(Bishop Allen, Page France, and Throw Me the Statue play the Crocodile on Saturday — $10, 8pm [crocodile])

I’ll be honest and start by confessing that the main reason that I got excited about Bishop Allen is because of two Andrew Bujalski films. Christian Rudder plays the infuriatingly accurrate non-committal sort of unrequited love object in Funny Ha Ha; Justin Rice is the wandering musician in search of himself and a new band in Mutual Appreciation. (We suspect him of being a slacker dilettante, hopping from girl to girl, party to party, and city to city until the fantastic moment where he plays an under-attended talent proving show at Galapagos.) The movies are perfect, uncomfortable mirrors, naturalistic looks at early-century twenty-something awkwardness. You should rent them tonight.

I’d heard a little bit from the band’s 2003 Charm School, but they’d slipped off my radar until I saw both of these on DVD this summer and was motivated to see what they’d been up to. This year’s The Broken String has been in heavy-rotation for the past couple weeks. It’s a sparkly indie gem: charming & catchy all over the place; occasional trumpets, nifty instrumentation, trading vocals; tiptoeing on the folky with gentle heartfelt storytelling lyrics; occasional poppy explosions. Just download “Rain” [mp3] or “Click Click Click Click” [mp3] and realize that the part from their press release calling the record the “toast of the blogosphere” is understandably on-target.

This graph, by indie-rock infographics genius Earl Boykins, nicely summarizes the album:

“bishop allen put out an LP! ‘the broken string’ is a collection of some of the jams from the EP’s and 3 new ones. is it any good?” [earlboykins]