The Shins: Wincing the Night Away Transcript

UMC.org Music Review

The Shins: Wincing the Night Away
Label: Sub Pop
Sound/Style: Quirky, inventive and vaguely unsettling post-punk era pop

By Steve Morley

UMC.org—The Shins are a left-of-center pop quartet originally from New Mexico, the southwestern U.S. state that is perhaps most alien to Americans from further north and east. With its patches of peculiar beauty and long stretches of desolate terrain, New Mexico could almost be another world. The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away suggests connections between that bleak landscape and the band’s spacious, oddly appointed music. The tuneful indie band has taken a distinct turn toward the eccentric on its third release, which echoes the experimental bent of late ‘70s and early ‘80s upstart rock and synth-pop: "Who decides who paddles over the falls/ Who makes the call/ Who makes the call?"

This is science project rock and roll, something seemingly birthed in a makeshift lab in a wood-paneled suburban basement. Frontman James Mercer’s compositions offset solid melodies with a fascination for light-and-dark juxtaposition, producing songs that can be as upbeat as they are offbeat. Sometimes, their pleasant effect can be deceptive.

The cheery and slightly goony first single, "Australia," is one of several tracks that panders to jaundiced hearts, revealing a skewed picture of the opposite sex. In it, Mercer tracks a female character whose need for love is rooted in insecurity, resulting in misery that the singer can’t fail to notice. His bid to help her involves a tandem leap to the street below. It might be an escape, or suicide, or both, but the song’s cavalier ending implies that either outcome is equally acceptable: "Watching the lantern dim/ Starved of oxygen/ So give me your hand and let’s jump out the window."

Nowhere on the disc is relationship presented in a positive light, and the record’s women are dominant, detached or dysfunctional. Mercer isn’t blaming them, though, attributing love’s failure to soul sickness in both parties: "So affections fade away/ And do adults just learn to play/ The most ridiculous, repulsive games?"

In a recent Pitchfork Magazine interview, Mercer said: "having convictions, having certitude, just leads to trouble." His ambivalent lyrics reflect his uneasiness with concrete beliefs, as he attempts to sidestep linear thought like someone might navigate around mud puddles. Even the CD’s printed lyrics travel maddeningly across and off the page in long, horizontal threads, making it hard to read along. But Mercer threatens to paint himself into a corner with his contention that we’re all better off without contentions. On "Spilt Needles," he offers clues to his aversion of belief systems and likens the experience of having them to "being perched on the handlebars of a blind man’s bike." In the song, beliefs are seen as nothing more than random, externally imposed plug-ins announcing that the end of free thought is lurking like something in a George Orwell novel: "You're old enough, boy/ Too many summers you've enjoyed/ So spin the wheel/ We'll set you up with some odd convictions."

On "A Comet Appears," Mercer comes closest to openly addressing spiritual issues. Not surprisingly, he debunks absolute truth as a convenient illusion: "Every post you can hitch your faith on/ Is a pie in the sky/ Chock full of lies/ A tool we devise/ To make sinking stones fly."

Because Mercer won’t ante up with a clear narrative, the listener is left to ponder his intent—are the album’s more somber efforts informed by cynicism and sour self-pity? Or is Mercer’s anemic melancholy covertly expressing compassion for a generation of lonely, hope-deprived wanderers? If Wincing the Night Away attempts to provide an anesthetic, it ultimately offers little hope, and never quite relieves the sleeplessness it can induce.

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