Wincing the Night Away

When a character played by Natalie Portman in the film Garden State tells another character that listening to The Shins will change your life, that's a lot of pressure. Who would want to contradict Natalie? And granted, the song she's talking about, New Slang, is one of those most ethereally catchy songs I've heard in the past few years. I'll admit I put in my CD player and hit 'repeat'. The Shins new album, Wincing the Night Away, doesn't have a song that good, but it's certainly consistent with their first two albums.

I made a mistake, though, listening to it the first time. I followed along with the lyric sheet. Not only is the lyric sheet designed so the lyrics from a song spread over two pages, meaning you have to turn the pages back and forth while reading along. The lyrics for the songs on this album are, to be charitable, inscrutable. They seem to be a scramble of words, selected for the sound they make rather than any meaning. Consider just a sample: "Frozen into coats, White girls of the North, Fire past one, fire the one, The are the fabled lambs, A Sunday ham, The ancient snow," or "Undaunted, you bathed in hollow cries, The boils were swollen, sunburned eyes, A reward for letting nothing under their skin, So help me, I don't know, I might, Just give the old dark side a try." These are by James Mercer, who it seems to me is either some kind of intense, twisted poet or simply a noodler, pulling words out of the air to fit the notes. In either way, it might as well as be Urdu.

Listening to this album and not caring about the words elicits a better response. There are some pleasant, catchy numbers, including three songs in a row: Phantom Limb, Sealegs and Red Rabbits. I put it on Saturday while sitting on my little patio and it was a nice experience.

Of course, what do lyrics matter in a rock and roll record? In my experience, they can add to a record, but unless they are aggressively stupid, they can't detract. I mean, we've had hit songs that say little more than Sh-boom, sh-boom, and hits like Louie Louie have impregnable lyrics. Perhaps if I had some sense of what Mercer is trying to say my life would be changed, but I'm sorry to say all I can offer is a shrug.