Miscellany

I don’t care what Natalie Portman said. I really don’t. It was just a cloying and painfully obvious attempt by a first-time writer-director to get "cool" audiences to identify with his rather unlikable main characters. It’s not the Shins’ fault that they got more popular because of it. Besides, we here at WAWGDWATT headquarters have neither the time nor the inclination to debate the street credibility of a guitar-based pop band. We just know we liked their first record and early singles so much, we’re pretty much willing to forgive anything, including the McDonald’s and Gap commercials, a bad second record, and, yes, even Garden State.

Anyway, the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away, due out on Sub Pop in January, leaked a couple of weeks back, and I’ve been listening to it all day today. I've enjoyed it very much so far. The first two songs, “Sleeping Lessons” and “Australia,” are pretty awesome, the former a great keyboard-led slow build to a garage-band-style climax, the latter an up-beat and terrific mood-shifter with an awesome Morrissey nod at the end: "So give me your hand and let's jump out the window." Then they get weird for a minute with “Pam Berry,” a track that’s more sound project than song, sort of like Oh, Inverted World’s “Your Algebra.” It’s fine, and it only lasts 56 seconds, so no bother.

“Phantom Limb” opens with some soft fuzz bass and the line, “Frozen into coats, white girls from the North.” Singer James Mercer goes onto to sing about feeling like a ghost, or something like that, and it’s so sad and pretty, and somewhere he talks about "cheap shots from the tribe" and “ another afternoon with the gold head tunes and pilfered booze,” right before the soaring chorus and the “oh-whoa-oh”s kick in. That’s what I like most about the Shins: they make melancholy seem like the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s a warm, hope-filled way of saying things suck.

Okay, four songs down. So far, so great.

After the high of “Phantom Limb” we’re given “Sea Legs,” with what the Sub Pop website calls a “hip-hop beat.” Well, if it is a hip-hop beat, it’s a pretty shitty one. But the band puts some strings and synths and hand claps over it, and it’s not so bad after a while. A nice change in style, but not so great as a song. That's followed by “Red Rabbits,” an okay song with a wood block beat and that same keyboard thing from “Sphagnum Esplanade” where the notes sound like water drops. (You know, this post is starting to seem like amateur music crit, so I think I’ll wrap things up.)

The record’s second half is not as strong as the first, with "Turn On Me" the only one I've really enjoyed. So far as I can tell, though, there are no really bad songs. I can’t remember what my point was with this post. I guess it was this: The Shins' new record leaked already. Go get that shit. (Maybe my point was just to make fun of Garden State one more time.)