The Shins - Wincing the Night Away
8/10
In terms of bands that defy explanation and classification the Shins are a band that play a wistful brand of pop music intermingled with left-field experimentation that allows them to hold on to their self-aware indie credentials at the same time. However they are now the formerly small band that now has a much larger audience due in large part to what seemed an incidental PR engine that advertised them to everyone from children to romantically challenged twenty-something fans of the film Garden State.
One has to think that the ramifications of that kind of notoriety would weigh on an artist and had to have figured into the making of Wincing the Night Away, but in this instance unlike so many others the effects feel less explicit than implicit. On Wincing the Night Away the Shins come across not making the timorous follow-up to a genre landmark like Chutes Too Narrow but rather meeting the expectations with the same wide-eyed panache that they have always possessed. This isn't all that surprising, the Shins have always sounded sonically gifted, if a bit odd, what is surprsing is the way that songwriter James Mercer has handled this album. The songs bound between advances in the bands sound and returns to the touchstones they've created. The lead track Sleeping Lessons begins with a vibraphone and Mercer's distorted vocals, it is immediately the most forward looking and most self referential track all at once, as the song builds into an exuberant jaunt that recalls the Shins of records past. The band pulls this trick again and again avoiding jumping the shark by consistently calling to mind their own familiar style but never retreating into it, while exploring new ground and pushing the boundaries around them. While the music is by far some of their best, the lyrics find Mercer using more and more oblique poetry to communicate, the most notable instance of this is on the song Red Rabbits where he sings "Into the crucible to be rendered an emulsion". It's difficult to interpret such a complex artifice of wordplay especially when it's placed in the context it is. This is not necessarily the case across all of the album as Australia has some of the more memorable lyrics in recent memory, "Faced with the dodo's conundrum / I felt like I could just fly / but nothing happened everytime I tried." In perspective, the lyrics seem forced in some sections but taken together with the genuinely memorable moments rarely hurt the atmosphere or the arrangements significantly. Given that the Shins appear to have recorded three excellent albums in a row, which is quite difficult for any band to do, I don't believe this band will be facing the aforementioned conundrum anytime soon.
2 comments:
To respond to your statement, I wasn't attempting to say that it was a bad thing, I simply said that it seemed incidental; like the publicity they received was sudden and somewhat unexpected. I'm more than glad to see the Shin's music receiving a much wider audience and I'm just as much a fan of the Garden State soundtrack as anybody. Musicians have to make money just like everybody else, and I think that holding that sort of thing against them is a foolish thing to do. Moreover if you're looking for a band that has weathered increasing fame and maintained a sense of themselves, then the Shins are it. I hope that helps to explain what I meant.
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