There is a lot of crap on the internet. Once you wade through the thousands of pages of fanfic, political blogs, Myspaces, Livejournals, web comics, and message boards, it’s hard not to find great music. Take Bishop Allen, the band of some guy who used to run TheSpark.com but now runs OKCupid.com and in his spare time apparently gets down in an Americana band-in-a-bucket out of Brooklyn, New York. Yeah, stuff like that is out there.

Bishop Allen is a prototypical, derivative, and excellent indie band: low-fi, folky, dreamy, complete with the classic tiny-but-devout online community of fans that probably took the same route I did to discover the band. Trying to relocate old features from the now-defunct TheSpark.com (which was bought out by Barnes & Noble), I discovered founder Christian Rudder’s personal website. This linked to the band he co-writes and strikes chords for, Bishop Allen. Sounds like a tenuous connection that wouldn’t merit any deeper digging, right? Wrong. Tracks like “Little Black Ache” are endearing, with almost a knowingly cute wink, but just veer away to settle in a groove of undeniably catchy pop. It’s hardly revolutionary and barely virtuoso, but still boisterous and amusing. The singer, not The Spark guy but the other one, has goofy hiccups in his yelping, the drum set can sound like two tin pans and a cymbal, the guitar work is only a cut or two above amateur.

Because of that, the band will probably never be huge. Bishop Allen will only sound like they were recorded live in a bar, or a basement, or a backyard; not quite EnormoDome arena rock. Catcalling to all their friends “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”-style in the bouncy semi-cover of “Eve of Destruction” only deepens that feeling of homegrown talent that no one else is allowed to know about. They exude the feeling of a local band even across the web, kept secret by nothing more than their eccentricity. The exhaustive search through minute references, broken website links, and Google searches ends in the discovery of a quirky group who seem all the better because of the trouble a fan goes through to hear about the band and listen to their tunes. Sure, the music has a cooler sheen to it after the obscurity of the search, but isn’t that what indie is all about? It definitely beats reading fanfic all day.

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