Spinning Plates #4

Once a week, Spinning Plates examines an essential “long player,” an album worth listening through from the first note to the last.

Long before Natalie Portman famously proclaimed that The Shins would “change your life,” the quartet (now a quintet) were just another indie rock band making a stop at Kentucky’s Southgate House. It was shortly after the release of 2001’s Oh, Inverted World, but years before the McDonald’s and Gap commercials and Gilmore Girls appearances would make The Shins a household name. A friend of mine, who had been raving about The Shins since he had seen them open for Modest Mouse a year or so earlier, persuaded me to check out their live show. It can occasionally be difficult for me to really get into a live performance if I have absolutely no familiarity with the band, so my expectations for the evening were somewhat low. It was an amazing sensation, then, to quickly come to the realization that I had found one of the most important bands in my life within the span of a single set.

With roughly 25 people in the audience, The Shins took the stage. Despite catcalls from a pair of drunks in the balcony (why they wanted to hear The Shins’ rendition of “Freebird,” I’ll never know), the show was utterly brilliant from beginning to end. James Mercer’s voice seemed to carry the weight of the world, while the soft-glow of the band’s sound recalled the best Brian Wilson songs you’ve never heard. By the time the band’s brief set had come to an end, I had completely renewed faith in the vitality of new music.

Chutes Too Narrow is a better album. The production is stronger and the songs are much less homogeneous (Mercer had a tendency to bury his vocals in the mix of earlier Shins recordings). Nevertheless, if there is one Shins album to fully absorb, it is Oh Inverted World. The LP is like a time capsule from an idyllic summer gone by. Every track is a bedroom-pop masterpiece with breezy arrangements and fuzzy sonics bouying Mercer’s sweetly melancholic lyrical observations.

I started my final year of undergraduate study the day after seeing The Shins on that warm August night in 2001. Songs like “New Slang,” “Past & Pending,” and “Pressed in a Book” had hungover in my head from the night before, setting the tone for the uncertainty that was to come as the real world quickly approached. The Shins have grown at great deal in the ensuing years and I would like to think that I have, too. Nevertheless, every time I put on Oh Inverted World, I am transported back to that last, golden summer of youth. In some ways, it still hasn’t ended.

— Curt Whitacre