Review Summary: Choked by expectations, The Shins wince from coming of age
Drug-like, Wincing the Night Away, which debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts, will keep you up for days on replay – each song a mini step to opening a gateway to a heavenly Indie pop-rock secret garden – if you’re a Shins virgin.
For everyone else, your three-year stint of celibacy might not meet expectations.
Because it seems that following the avalanche of praise and cries of genius for The Shins’ debut Oh, Inverted World and second release Chutes Too Narrow, singer-songwriter James Mercer and his Indie quintet were burnt by the razzle-dazzle of media bliss, ran, then hid underground in order to find solitude to work on an album.
The result: a labored sense of struggle to recapture past glory and lack of fresh air that congests the talented writing; most tracks are weighed down, devoid of the energy-laced weightless clever clouds that pervaded the past albums.
Lyrics like “Let’s carve my aging face off / fetch us a knife,” from A Comet Appears (the closest thing to a new New Slang), and “Eviserate your fragile frame/And spill it out in the ragged floor,” from the muffled underwater Sleeping Lessons, feature the newfound dark moodiness, but don’t feel quite genuine – something a hundred replays can’t cure.
The reflectively catchy Phantom Limb and running-through-flower-fields-music-video ready Australia are undeniably killer, except the smell of a recycled Chutes reeks. Though, the at first easy to glance over “Sea Legs” polishes itself over a few listens aided by its experimentation with hip-hop beats and a swaying violin.
It’s not that the album is entirely bad; it’s just not the transcendental Indie experience you waited for.
However, keep holding off and don’t give up hope on this too talented band – an aural orgasm of unprecedented proportions waits in the future.
Just look at Wincing the Night Away as a pubescent trial and error stage for The Shins to figure things out and mature – especially from a confusion-inducing fan base chokehold based on an event that shall not be (completely) named:
damn you Portman; the garden used to be secret.
