February 3rd, 2007
The sexy sixties, the suave seventies, the awful eighties, the neurotic nineties. Each preceding century seems to have an interesting musical character. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of youth–that things nowadays don’t seem somehow as exciting as “back then”:
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair,
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air,
I was born too late into a world that doesn’t care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.
Too right you were born into a world that doesn’t care, but whining about it doesn’t help. Neither does writing dreadfully anachronistic songs: punk rockers would have never worn flowers in their hair. We’re over half-way through this century and if this temporal hand-wringing is all we can come up with musically, then we’re in trouble. But I don’t really think this at all: I think we’ve got a nice little zeitgeist going.
I first got into The Shins in 2005 after watching Garden State. The twenties version of sixties The Graduate, to which it nods its head subtly with the inclusion of The Only Living Boy in New York. Like many people, my favourite song was New Slang, so I promptly bought the “Oh, Inverted World” CD and was treated to something more unusual than what I had expected, but still wonderful.
Inverted World is quite different from “Wincing The Night Away”, the trebly single-coil pickup sound isn’t used as much, and James Mercer sings his lyrics noticeably clearer. The CD case is a nice environmentally-friendly cardboard affair and contains a booklet of lyrics, which are without punctuation and run through one page to the next. Their incomprehensibility challenges even the most abstract Bob Dylan song, yet somehow still remain meaningful. Mercer’s voice phases in and out, picking out certain words like: “born to multiply”, “I’ve earned myself an impossible crime” and “no straws to grab just the rushing wind”–glimpses that offer you at least some inroads into the meaning of the song.
In a strange way it’s difficult to listen to the words. A lot of their songs remind me of a machine grinding into operation, throwing out sparks once it gets going. The unusual sound effects in Oh, Inverted World, particularly at the start of “Pressed in a Book”, which sounds like something getting tightened up with a spanner, prompts this odd description. In Wincing The Night Away I think the machinery sound lives on–but underwater. There’s a strong nautical theme running through the album, both in sound and lyrically with such songs as “Sealegs”, “Girl Sailor”–”Sail her girl” and “Black Wave”–the start of which sounds like someone breathing from an air-cylinder underwater. Cheers from the crowd at the end of “Red Rabbits” also sound oddly like the sea swelling over shingle. Even the cover looks like a mixture of blood platelets, sperm tails and palm trees rising out of little island globules.
The start of the album really lends itself to Mercer’s style of singing–a sort of urging–that you’ve got to listen to what he’s saying. There’s a lot of meaning put behind seemingly innocuous lyrics. As you progress, songs get more introspective, hinting at the motives behind writing them, which is covered in a good Guardian interview. There have always been somewhat malevolent undertones in Shins songs; for instance there’s just something about this lyric in New Slang that makes me feel queasy: “the bakers at dawn may they all cut their thumbs, / and bleed into their buns ’till they melt away”. Wincing The Night Away is no stranger to these undertones, and “A Comet Appears” trails you off to a dark end:
let’s carve my aging face off fetch us a knife start with my eyes down so the lines form a grimacing smile… there is a numbness in your heart and it’s growing…
The album is different from their previous work, with the more accessible sound, but the change is welcome: the new sound and emerging undertones leave you comfortably with the feeling that this progressive band has progressed once again.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
What do you think 2000-2010 will be called? era of silly people? HA! We’ll get somethin’ stupid.