The Shins Are Not Gonna Change Your Life

The truth can now be told. The Shins are not gonna change your life. And, as a live-in-concert band, well,  they are not good at all.

The Shins played at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis on Friday night June 1 and, first, their volume level was about what you'd expect from a bunch of head-bangers, not a poppy, melodic, Beatlesque group. Their signature attribute, James Mercer's wonderfully creative vocal melodies, were buried beneath a thick layer of grunge.

And the vocals themselves left much to be desired. Mercer can no longer sing much of his older material (from the terrific Chutes Too Narrow and Wincing the Night Away). I would expect to hear better vocals on, say, "Australia" at your local karaoke emporium. He just can't hit those high notes anymore. And, speaking of "Australia," the Shins' new guitarist (was it Yuuki Matthews or Robert Swift?) was unable to play the inspired guitar solo, petering out after more or less hitting the first four bars.

So all in all, The Shins were a huge disappointment, as is their new release Port of Morrow. Overall the recording and the concert, in comparison to The Shins' best work, features a notably slower pace, and is less melodic and more atmospheric. Brooding, you might say, versus Wincing's carefree and uplifting character.

One cannot but infer that Port of Morrow has been a "troubled" project. Mercer announced in 2009 that keyboardist Marty Crandall and drummer Jesse Sandoval had left the band, to be replaced by Ron Lewis (from Grand Archives), Eric D. Johnson (from the Fruit Bats) and Joe Plummer (of Modest Mouse). And, he added, the new recording would be released the following year.

But Port of Morrow was in fact released only in 2012, and Greg Kurstin proved to the be featured musician, playing on 9 of the 10 tunes. Drummer Plummer played on 5, Lewis on 5 and Johnson on 3. Kurstin and Mercer are listed as co-producers.

The title track, Mercer says, is named after the port authority in the city of Boardman, OR, on the Columbia River. "There’s a sign by the side of the road that says 'Port of Morrow' and I always just wondered about it, I guess. When writing that song it popped into my head and I was thinking of it as death, like what’s beyond the exit point, the 'port of morrow,' the port into tomorrow? [...] Everyone’s future is death. That’s a very dark way to look at it, but in the song it just happened to fit in with that thing. Like the ace of spades, port of morrow, life is death, death is life." (From an interview in Drowned in Sound, March 23, 2012)


So you can say that the brooding tone of the record is what was required by the material. But why would Mercer choose to leave his brilliantly poppy style behind to write dirges to death? It's like Kenneth Branagh giving up Shakespeare or Albert Pujols deciding to hit singles. A curious decision, and Mercer's loss as well as our own.


If it's brooding you want, The Antlers did it better as one of two opening acts for The Shins. First came Deep Sea Diver, featuring Shins' guitarist Jessica Dobson on guitars, keyboards and vocals. To describe her and them as mediocre would be kind.


The Antlers, on the other hand, successfully created a series of atmospheres or soundscapes. Add in Peter Silberman's high-pitched vocals, and the band proved to be highly evocative of Radiohead, which is not a bad thing to evoke.