I maintain that if Bishop Allen had not released all of those songs last year, we would find this album to be mindblowing. Of course it's a bit anticlimactic since these songs are a year old to us.

Tell me, honestly, if you hadn't heard any of the EPs, and you were listening to the Broken String versions of Flight 180, Butterfly Nets, The Monitor for the very first time, that you'd think this album deserves a 6.0? That's lunacy.

The album stands alone as a work of art. It deserves to be judged on its own merits. If it pales in comparison to the EPs, that's a different article than an album review. It needs to be taken out of that context. If the reviewer can't do that, then he's not doing a very good job.