Shins' "Wincing the Night Away"

sometimes yes.i'm not sure thats a good thing, though.
also reminds me of the decemberists.

If they start it now, they can get it perfectly pretentious by January

Brilliant!

lol, this makes me remember when me and my friend were just hating on the shins and their ridiculous lyrics. there was this group around us enamored with them and we couldn't understand what the hell was so great about this band.

In terms of ratings, except, it should get like a 3.9.
Maybe i need to let it grow on me, but ughh I don't even want to listen to this again, the cd sounds so awful. Contrived? half like, they've got this G State weight on their shoulders to alter some lives, so they're going to experiment a little and sound different, but also they've got new fans to account for and keep, so they're going to stick to what they know as well with familiar melodies.
And the half-assedness of their musical approach shows fully here, too, as someone remarked upthread.
Embarrassing arrangments, I agree with that.

Thumbs down.
Yeah, and the Shivvers keep coming right after each song when I put them in my itunes, which oddly matches the sound of the Shins a bit, except i'd rather hear "Teen Line" 11 times over than go through Wincing again.

http://myspace.com/theshins

On first listen it's not amazing, not terrible. "Phantom Limb" sure sounds like the one they wrote with indie film sleeper hit in mind.

If they hadn't've existed they never would have found themselves in this predicament. I blame rock and roll in general.

"New slang when you notice the stripes
the dirt in your fries
hope it's right when you die"

They played "New Slang" on SNL instead of another new song. They're not exactly ducking the Garden State thing.

Umm, Marmot, nobody argued with you about that movie boosting their profile a bit! I just thought it was off-base for you to say that playing "New Slang" on SNL somehow equates to Garden State wagon-riding, or something: it very clearly been their big successful crossover song from the get-go, and I imagine they'd have played it on SNL any given week since the moment they wrote it. (Similarly, for a Burger King equivalent, if Modern English were mysteriously asked to be on SNL, I'm betting they would play "I Melt with You.")

(The problem with "New Slang" isn't that it's not a nice song, it's that people who follow this kind of music have spent 5/6 years watching various attempts to product-place and remarket it into the big crossover hit it had some vague potential to be.)

I was replying to jonviachicago that if the band were really sick of being associated with that movie (which is really the first thing people think of by now, not the McD ad or any other shows it was used in the background of) they might not have played that song.

(The problem with "New Slang" isn't that it's not a nice song, it's that people who follow this kind of music have spent 5/6 years watching various attempts to product-place and remarket it into the big crossover hit it had some vague potential to be.)

Exactly! I'm not faulting them for playing the song, just saying that all that stuff must not bother them that much.
"Would the Shins even be on SNL if it weren't for Garden State?", wasn't a weird tangent to me, because there are a lot of bands with an indie following and songs in commercials and TV shows that won't be playing on SNL any time soon.

Which also suggests that there must be more reasons for The Shins being on SNL than just having been in a movie. Probably a combination of good marketing and, like them or not, catchy songs with a very recognizable and unique sound.

For another thing, I think what people are saying here is that playing "New Slang" does not exactly scream "GARDEN STATE" to anyone. Once again, it's been their most broadly popular song from the day they released an LP. The vast majority of people watching SNL have probably never heard the Shins and never seen Garden State. There's just kind of no question that you'd play your pseudo-hit, especially if the show is asking you to! (Which they probably were!) So it seems weird to connect that too much to the movie.

Maybe The Shins changed their lives? And yeah, New Slang is a great song.

I certainly don't expect it would to anyone on this board, but there is a middle ground between indie rock obsessives who knew all about the Shins from the beginning and people who don't pay that much attention to music in movies/commercials. The latter may be in the majority but the people in the middle still outnumber the former, and I think that those people would associate that song with that movie more than anything else, for better or worse. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The vast majority of people watching SNL have probably never heard the Shins and never seen Garden State.

I think that a not negligible amount of people who watch SNL are Natalie Portman fans judging by how popular her Andy Samberg rap video was. There's got to be a crossover with Scrubs fans who'd pay to see a movie with Zach Braff and her in it.

None of this even matters either way, because I completely agree that New Slang would be the key song for them to play on SNL regardless.

I think the echo chamber of the internet may be leading to an overestimation of the number of kids who carry copies of the Garden State soundtrack in their breast pockets.

Right, but the soundtrack is currently ranked #202 in Amazon music. There's an awful lot of people in this echo chamber still buying the damn thing.

Well, it'd be an interesting experiment in, uh, cultural messaging or something, if we could set up an alternate universe where all else was equal, except that that line wasn't in the movie.

That's all I've been trying to say! Would they be popular enough for SNL without that scene? I don't see it. It's not a value judgment regarding their music in any way. Like you, I wouldn't pay money to listen to them or anything, but they're ok.

I am weirdly liking this album. Not hearing the Cure comparisons, but, vocally, stuff like 'Sea Legs' (which is pretty amazing btw) is pure Moz

I agree. 'Sea Legs' does justice to their name.

the new shins song is very good imo!

where the h is markers

Agreed. I wasn't interested in them when the hype broke but their last album is really quite different. Looking forward to "Port Of Morrow".

Well Port Of Morrow is a triumphant return. I find myself in agreement with a Pitchfork review as well. I have listened to it about 7 times now and consider at least the equal of Chutes Too Narrow. Its a very warm and uplifting album with ten perfect tracks. Brilliant.

I'll need to hear the rest. "Simple Song" struck me as hysterically overproduced; it's like Mercer auditioned for a part in How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb.

I think most of its tracks wouldn't sound out of place on BBC radio 2 to be honest. Its just one of them albums I instantly love and play end to end. If you didn't like Simple Song I'd guess you probably wont dig the album.

Not necessarily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ij7l-bf7lk

Wrote a little thing on "Simple Song," which I LOVE and do not think was overproduced.

I like it now I've read the Pitchfokr review

How the fuck can you like anything until the arbiters of taste have wanked themselves off over something?

fuck knows, i'm a severed head

At least you have still got your ears.

:(

this has been talked about here also: The Shins

Live web concert on Late Show with David Letterman starts in about 40 minutes.

I mean on the show's web site!