The remixed, remastered, reissue of When You Land Here, It’s Time to Return (1197) the first James Mercer helmed band Flake Music drops November 25th. Listen to the full album stream via NPR’s First Listen.
Oh man! this excites me as much (more so) as finding a crumpled twenty in a forgotten pair of jeans. Big The Shins fan am I. And so anything relating to James Mercer and company deserves my immediate and complete attention.
For those who experienced and lived through the songs of Oh!Inverted World (2001), Chutes Too Narrow (2003) and Wincing the Night Away (2007) you know. You know. You know how through personal upheaval (real or imagined) The Shins helped temper the chaos and settle the hurt. Songs that didn’t talk down at you. Songs that challenged you to listen closely and decipher quickly. Songs which got to you in the most cunning way. These were (and still remain) songs as arms about your shoulder, whispered concern and errant kisses.
The Shins were our new-age Beetles, though with more melancholy and less joy. This smart whimsical mouth-piece of a band for the misunderstood masses gave us the wind in our faces in Oh! Inverted World. And yes we were inverted. These tomes forced us to look inward and to shrink not from the darkness. Each song a flickering beacon lighting our senses to sense. Music for us small literate nobodies who shook quietly beneath the soothing safety of Caring is Creepy, Know Your Onion and Girl Inform Me. The beautiful composition and lyrical power poetry of New Slang. May we have a moment of silence please? Amen.
And the album soldiered on spilling the quirky Tequila shot of Girl On A Wing, “… into the cracks where fall and winter collide…I surrender all my gall in a song of modern love…”. Then finally, the shhh everything is fine because Past And Pending wore off the sharp edges and lulled us into lithium dreams… ending with the softly cooing “lose yourself in lines dissecting love” ’til your heart mended or you succumbed to self pity and comfortable misery.
And that was just the first Shins album!
Chutes Too Narrow opened a wormhole of can openers with Kissing The Lipless. The sweetness of just a bit of lunacy goes a long way. The sonic propulsion of So Says I spurred us on to leap at something hopeful in the dark and our faith paid off. But we filled Saint Simon‘s purse with our silvery coins and were given…
Mercy’s eyes are blue
When she places them in front of you
Nothing really holds a candle to
The solemn warmth you feel inside of you…
and still it was wasn’t enough for such sinners as we are perpetually greedy.
So we were anointed upon our not so pristine foreheads with the bitter crumbs and spoiled wine of the Eucharist that is the beautifully lonesome Those To Come. We sat stupefied and our ears marveling at such beauty, and it would have to be enough. Then we sat on our hands, waiting almost four years.
The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away is my favorite Shins album. This is beginning to end such an imaginative collection of well-crafted songs, eleven of them!
Sleeping Lessons opens the way and how. This song is not so much a meditation on rebelliousness as it it a caterwaul to stand your ground and rail against the priggish and exploitative institutions both government, corporate and familial.
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“And if the old guards still defend,
They got nothing left on which you depend,
So enlist every ounce of your bright blood,
And off with their heads…Jump from the book,
You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise.”
This is powerful stuff and although we’re used to James Mercer schooling us he isn’t condescending or pedantic. Not scolding, only offering us eyes in which to see. And ears which finally hear the inner notes of a mechanism which protects and advocates a ruinous status quo.
Check what their label Sub Pop had to say about this amazing album.
Then after feasting on the still fleshy carcasses of all the songs which came before we Shins fans looked to the horizon for something new and delicately bitter sweet. After five years our prayers (and or fervent hopes) were answered in the form and release of the magnificent Port Of Morrow (2012).
I still posit that James M. is our modern day Morrissey (The Smiths) but way cooler and with better manners. But that’s just me.
I am curious to read what fans of The Shins have to say about The Shins. Let me know in the comment section below. Peace.