from the excellent music site - Said the Gramophone - in a post from May 2007 - there's this
---

Bishop Allen's second album, Bishop Allen and The Broken String, will be released on July 24. The album will include new versions of songs from last year's twelve EPs, as well as some other things. "Rain" is one of the other things, a heretofore unreleased song, and at You Ain't No Picasso you can hear the version that will be released this summer.

But the demo of "Rain" is better, much better, and it's that which I share with you.

It's a pop song about desperate unhappiness. A joyous, kinetic, catchy, beautiful song about desperate unhappiness. "Now it's really pouring / it's crawling up the shore / and I walked and never heard / and umbrella does no good / and I guess it's in my blood / and I couldn't stop the flood." Justin Rice's voice is morning-muddled, cracking like it's the first time he's used it. I see a man on his fire-escape, glum, wiped, soaked to the skin. And then he stands and stamps so hard that the fire-escape collapses around him, with him, falling with the sound of cymbals. "Rain" isn't even a song about surmounting unhappiness: it's a song about sorrow's necessity, the need to taste tears so that you can later taste sweetness. "Oh!! Let the rain fall down! And wash this world away! Oh, let the sky be grey." Those Ohs, those lovely, brave, boisterous ohs. A sound that flies from the heart through a wide-open throat, the blues sung fast and jubilant into a glittering silver mike.

I climbed mountains to this song.

("Rain 2.0" thumps harder, but it's clean, too clean, the lyrics' fog already long-cleared. The electric guitar's up front, dopily cheerful. All desperation's evaporated, like vanished puddles on sunny streets. Singing about a melancholy long after that melancholy has passed.)

---

here's the track -

Also - really miss the You Ain't No Picasso music site as well. I'm pretty sure that's the place that got me hooked into BA in the first place.