1 The Shins from left: Dave Hernandez, Marty Crandall, James Mercer, and Jesse Sandoval.
Tamborello, Brian
The Shins
Issue #30
Garden State's favorite band winces the hype away on their forthcoming
By Emily Anderson
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 11:07am
While we can’t know how long it took James Mercer to pen Oh, Inverted World or Chutes Too Narrow, we can only know he didn’t have the expectations of everyone who ever had a girl crush on Natalie Portman riding on his shoulders. After the year of “this music will change your life,” the Shins toured extensively, trying to ride the wave and perhaps postpone the inevitable follow-up album. But premature buzz for an album that didn’t even have a song to its name has been hounding the Shins for about a year now. An over-eager music press first predicted its release for May of ’06, which came and went before the Shins had even made it into the studio.
In late October, just a week after Sub Pop sent out the first coveted press copies of Wincing the Night Away (slated to be released January 23, 2007), the world is waiting for that first leak — even Shins keyboardist Marty Crandall. “I’ve been online today doing a little research, and I haven’t found any hard evidence … I mean, on Google at least.” Yet the pre-release buzz, which has now thankfully eclipsed the pre-production buzz, is steadily mushrooming. Wincing has been dubbed as the Shins’ most experimental album to date, as well as (fingers crossed) the greatest.
“There were a lot of suggestions as to when it was going to be released,” Crandall says. “But all three albums have started at home, with James in his apartment. James does not write on the road or on tour. He has to have alone time, time to reflect.”
After the Shins stopped touring last spring, the band returned home to Portland, and Mercer got married, settled in, and hired a producer. Joe Chiccarelli, who has worked with Frank Zappa, Beck, and U2, provides Wincing with a panache and studio quality that fans who prefer their mid-tempo indie pop fuzzy and amateurish may balk at. “On the first album there were a lot of weird, obscure little noises and things. With a producer there was a lot of time for experimentation. It gives it a little extra punch I think. There’s a lot of production, which can turn people off, but I don’t think it’s overproduced — it’s just lush. I think it’s our best album yet.”
Wincing the Night Away opens with the sound of footsteps running up the stairs. Someone slams the door, and then you are immersed in the subterranean “Sleeping Lessons,” a track that at first sounds like it was recorded inside an aquarium, the distorted voice of Mercer fighting through a mouth of bubbles. It isn’t instantly recognizable as the Shins until the shimmery guitars come crashing in halfway through. The Shins keep the momentum going for 11 tracks, the obvious standouts being their first single-to-be, “Phantom Limb” (reportedly about high school lesbian lovers), and “Sea Legs,” a track Marty says may surprise fans because it’s “Morrissey-ish”-ness. One of the two is destined to be the new “New Slang.” But the dark horse for that title is closing track “A Comet Appears,” a slow, elegiac number that includes classic Mercer lines like, “They shone a chlorine light on a host of individual sins. Let’s carve my aging face off, fetch us a knife, start with my eyes, down to the lines form a grimacing smile.”
After the mammoth success of Garden State, the Shins are wary of commercial/movie tie-ins. “We’ve never met Natalie Portman. We met Zach Braff once, and that was cool, but obviously we would’ve preferred Natalie. It’d be great if she actually, you know, liked the music and really did endorse it. We get a lot of commercial offers now but not movies. Ultimately, James has the final say. But everyone always wants ‘New Slang.’” As for their post-Wincing tour plans, Crandall did drop this bombshell: “We’ve just started wearing matching shirts.”
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