:: Track Listing

1, Sleeping Lessons
2. Australia
3. Pam Berry
4. Phantom Limb [mp3]
5. Sea Legs
6. Red Rabbits
7. Turn on Me
8. Black Wave
9. Spilt Needles
10. Girl Sailor
11. A Comet Appears

:: Record Review

The Shins

Wincing the Night Away
(Sub Pop; 2007)

Rating: 73%
Combined Rating: 74%


I'm going to attempt to review the new Shins record. It will not be easy. There will be flailing, circumlocution, panic, self-loathing, and, occasionally, analysis. This is because I like the Shins, I really do, and I don't want to give them the easy review others will: dismissive, perfunctory, apologetic, whatever. When WhatWouldJesusBlog outlined, recently, its Shins Album Review Drinking Game, they unwittingly hit the nail (critic) on the head (beret). They not only correctly pinpointed the impossibility of analyzing the album outside of its hype, but also rendered meaningless the task of placing the album in any sort of hierarchy. All they thought they were doing was pointing out how obnoxious the indie press is, and I agree -- I'm sick of the Amidala puns, too -- but then, here I am, pawn in the indie press, on a twelfth draft at the thirteenth hour attempting to think outside that box the game outlines. And all I can do is paint a portrait of that box, define its boundaries, show how stuck within it I am. This review will, in other words, obnoxiously break every one of those ten rules, except, probably, for #7, because I've never seen the Shins live. But I may lie, for the sake of completion.

Obviously, adhering to these rules would necessitate a frat's worth of Natty Light, and, while my writing does read better while drunk, I certainly won't require that readers begin their binge on my accord. But, for the record, Zack Braff's film Garden State was a quaint but poor movie, imbuing gravitas into scenes that were ultimately built just for holding gravitas; "New Slang" was, like Natalie Portman's facial features, one of many woefully misappropriated treasures in the film; Sub Pop, knowing well the signs of a turn in the zeitgeist and how lucrative predicting such a turn can be, positioned these quaint, friendly indie darlings as crossover giants, and hey! bigups to Modest Mouse, whose similarly new shit is taking shots for sounding too poppy. (Drink ten beers, with a shot of whiskey thrown in for an oblique mention of Nirvana.) I could keep going, but I'm not, because in theory you're already pretty fucked up and I'm not trying to have you pass out before I get to the end of this thing. We've got a long way to go.

It's easy to fault the band for expanding their sound -- drink a beer! -- when, at times, that expansion falls flat, when a holding pattern would've been just what we wanted, and perhaps would've shifted a few more units, too. It's also easy to hold "Sleeping Lessons" up against "Kissing the Lipless," finding this album's opener a bit more lyrical, a lot more bombastic, but the last quirkier, more characteristic of the band's endearing jagged edges, and both of them lacking the metaphysical lilt of "Caring is Creepy." Those edges have been sanded off on Wincing, and it's easy to find this an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It's easy to call them sell-outs for doing this; it's a little harder to appreciate the sincerity of their expansion effort. It's easy to find fault in the production, clean and full even when atmospheric, a distillation of the first two albums' aesthetics into a more palatable and radio-ready whole. It's easy to do all of this, but it's vague, unhelpful criticism. Chances are, you've already heard the record, and this stuff is all apparent on first listen. But enough about the Shins -- let's talk about American Idol.

Yes, motherfuckers. More specifically, let's talk about Simon Cowell. In the paragraphs above, I ran through some of the reasons to love or hate Wincing; but, like I said, that's only one way to review an album, the way that violates the drinking game rules, the boring way. There's another, harder way, and it involves, for the sake of a universal reference point, a whole lot of Simon Cowell. Like the Shins and all other popular entities, Cowell is the unwitting focal point of a literally indescribable quantity of emotion and opinion. This is the nature of fame -- a tricky thing to assess, sure, but also the primary source of obfuscation in any attempt to review Wincing the Night Away, so go with me. The point I'm making isn't about fame, though, so much as it is about criticism, but back to Cowell: Let's just acknowledge, quickly, the disjunction between most people's opinion of the guy and the way I think he actually tries to behave. Cowell is characterized most frequently as someone we "love to hate," but more realistically we love and hate him, simultaneously and nebulously, as we do all famous people -- the Shins, let me remind you, included.

My point about Cowell is that we hate him, ostensibly, because he's a dick, and, like that other bawdy Brit who hosted The Weakest Link, we love him because all of his insults are formulated identically. For example:

Randy: No, dog. No.
Paula: I'm sorry, sweetheart.
Simon: I'm not trying to be rude, but you sounded like a ____ trying to ____.
Randy: (Guffaws)
Paula: (Gently shoves Simon's shoulder) Simon!

Cowell seems to relish the act of disillusioning the various creatures that blow like lint before his attention, and while his cohosts normally opt for a simpler "no," Cowell takes the time to describe why these people suck. When a 6'7" Air Force flunky walked in and howled "Respect" at the judges recently, Paula and Randy lost their shit and immediately lauded the singer ("Loved ya!"), while Simon took a moment before describing her as "vaudevillian." He attempted to continue, but his fellow judges snerked disparagingly, apparently upset that Simon hadn't also been blown away. He liked her, right, he just wanted to correctly categorize the experience, using emotions and words besides just unbridled enthusiasm (Paula) or "Welcome to Hollywood, dog" (Randy). Chris Daughtry, last year's shoo-in groan-rocker, was initially lambasted by Cowell for "rocking" too "hard" on a competition watched by soccer moms and toddlers; when the singer remained the front-runner, Cowell gave in and said, "You are the first artist we have had on American Idol who has refused to compromise," which exactly encapsulated the singer's appeal. Paula and Randy, meanwhile, gushed enthusiastically that Daughtry was brilliant, they loved him, he was a champion -- words, in short, that meant nothing. Cowell acknowledges a greater reality, the dimensions beyond the frankly insignificant "quality" of the singer's voice. For this we hate him, apparently. I think, however, that it is more in his juxtaposition with the other hosts than in the nature of his insults that we vilify Cowell. And this is why I can't review the Shins' new record. Not, at least, the way I want to, the way it deserves.

I can take or leave Simon Cowell, but I give him credit for attempting to deliver legitimate criticism in the face of a breathtakingly immense cultural phenomenon -- that is, the show itself. Paula and Randy view music (or singing, whatever) as a linear affair; there are many bad singers, and good ones get to go to Hollywood (, dog), and great ones get to record with Clive Davis. This is how bad critics review. Check pretty much any videogame website for examples, where a game is classified exclusively by genre and "goodness," so some are excellent, others are terrible, but none fall within the grey areas of sublime, calculated, graceful, pedantic, libidinal, etc. I'm not talking about vocabulary: I'm talking about the dimensions a critic uses to react to art. (Leave alone, today, the question of whether videogames qualify.) I can review like that, if I want: Chutes Too Narrow (2003) is one of the best albums of the oughts; Oh, Inverted World (2001) is slightly less good, a few bum numbers sticking out between highlights "New Slang" and "Caring is Creepy"; and Wincing the Night Away is probably the worst of the three. My tastes, portrayed visually:


--*-------------------------*----------------------------------------------*---------------*---------------*--
Moby.................... Linkin Park ..............................................WtNA......... ....OIW............. CTN


Good, better, best. 73%, 83%, 92%. You might see what I'm getting at here.

Music can be pinned down on a line like this, but it shouldn't; it's reductive; music fluctuates, grows, starts to suck, a new pocket opens up, it sounds happy, makes us sad. My favorite word in the English language, both because of its prickled, key-like shape and its implications, is "delineate": it expresses both compression and explosion, order and disarray. I am obsessed with delineating critical thought. So my reviews, more often than not these days, attempt to refute the linearity of the assignment, to keep their gaze on something besides the music, either the other reviews on the horizon or the adorable self-referential task of reviewing the album at hand.

Whoa, solipsism! I'll redirect. Good criticism, obviously, moves away from the Paula and Randy school. P&R critics are capable of pinpointing the good and bad, sure, and it can be fun to dish out derision at the ones on the bottom, but the ones at the top deserve the same even categorization, the same placement, analysis, reaction, only moreso, because they're, you know, good. Cowell holds the upper measure of his barometer steady even in a haze of distraction. Linear music criticism is one-dimensional, but actual music fandom is (at least) four-dimensional, in that it encompasses the objective quality of the music, all the other emotions and impressions the listener feels, the rest of the physical and metaphysical environment (location, listener, mood), and the period of time over which it's listened (including months and years for atrophy or enshrinement). I guess I should mention, at this point, that up until last weekend I'd not planned on reviewing this record, and was listening to it passively, as a fan, allowing it the four dimensions we all allow to albums we enjoy. I enjoy Wincing the Night Away, and now I'm pinning it on a line, watching its wings flap slower and slower.

Because, linearly, this is obviously the Shins' worst record. For every elastic, tuneful, vacuum-packed "Phantom Limb" or "Australia" -- pop craftsmanship of the highest order, redolent of Chutes' front-to-back triumph, crystalline, flawless and packed so thick with thoughts and words and hooks that they unravel marvelously indefinitely -- there's an obvious b-side like "Red Rabbits," which burbles and goes nowhere for five minutes, or "Turn on Me"'s quaint "fond of y-o-u" chorus but unsettling ultimate transparency. For all the interesting percussive overextension of "Sea Legs," there's the certainty that the Shins fucking with drum machines is a fun but perhaps useless endeavor, like the idea of RJD2 abandoning beatmaking for earnest songcraft. Tracks like "Pam Berry" and the unfortunately listless "Black Wave" -- a lyrically entranced glance into unfathomable darkness -- simply lack the musical invention of their neighbors on the album. Sure, "Black Wave" is a relaxed prelude to the dusky synth pop of "Spilt Needles," but a breathing, fully-developed song would've lead in better. It was an effulgent density, after all, that separated Chutes Too Narrow from pretty much every other pop album of the past seven years, including, unfortunately, this one.

So there it is: the linear line on this record, a frank disappointment, "cautiously positive." But there are other conclusions to be reached. The school of linear criticism puts Wincing the Night Away on a line that starts with Flake Music, a line that contains, to the chagrin of almost everybody in the universe, a movie called Garden State. There is another story to tell, though, and it has scattered blips in a childhood Beatles rush, Super Mario World, ill-tuned acoustic renditions of "New Slang," the smell of my girlfriend's bedroom the night this record leaked, some kid who asked me a year ago if I'd ever heard of this one band called the Shins. I had, I told him. They were my favorite band.

This array of half-thoughts encircles the result of weeks of listening to this record four-dimensionally; it reminds me why I let myself live with this music, and it explains why I review it with such exasperating disillusionment. The certainty of the above disappointments is abased by the warm, indefinite quality that endears the Shins so wholly to listeners, by the unerring earnestness that has always defined their music. There's something intangible in it: the svelte sincerity of James Mercer's voice, the mercurial dance between the lyrics' meaning and the words' mere sounds, the hair's width tread between opacity and personability. Why, after all, did Natalie stick those headphones on Zack in the first place? It's the same reason we hated to watch her do it: this is a band that garners devotees, not fans, and her chintzy endorsement sent a shockwave into our hearts, we who claimed and loved them first. There's little in-between with the Shins: people either love them or haven't really heard them. They are a favorite band, and favorite bands change lives, duly noted. They subsume listeners' adoration with the same fluidity that listeners absorb their music, slowly but constantly and ever increasingly. The Shins are one of the few bands that can define a genre -- here, "indie pop" -- as a specific sonic experience; they are a band that tickles the cerebrum in a cranny nobody else has really figured out how to reach yet. In all of these ways, Wincing the Night Away is thrillingly, superbly sufficient. It is an album by the Shins, with all of these intangible virtues attached. Fame is just static, interception interference, the fuzz fucking with my sincerest attempts to admit that the new Shins album is just as good as the old ones, if not for me then for someone else. Or not. Fame is self-doubt and lust and the reason American Idol draws viewers. Fame is what made Natalie Portman's endorsement so poisonous. Fame is something the Shins will have to get used to. I suppose we should do the same. Clayton Purdom :: 26 January 2007 |