Garden State has a lot to answer for. Yes it’s now lazy journalism to combine Zack Braff’s directorial debut with the emergence of The Shins in pop culture, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It’s not the same in 2017 though as my path back to the band came from a completely different cultural icon: Breaking Bad.
The Shins don’t feature in the series impeccable soundtrack but they do share Walter White’s residence of Albuquerque New Mexico. Hey it doesn’t take a lot for a writer to think “there’s a possible article in this.”
I digress, let’s go back to January 2007, when The Shins released their third, and best, album entitled Wincing the Night Away. In many interviews the band had to constantly field questions about how much they owed Garden State for bringing them to a wider audience, a fact that didn’t’ sit to well. The fact is Garden State has had a critical rethink in the years since its release. Many former fans, of which I was definitely one of, grew out of the films mopey message that Natalie Portman will fix your life for you, and the very idea of a manic pixie dream girl was completely obliterated by the three dimensional real life women that I was finally not afraid to talk to. The point is Garden State was hollow, directed like Braff was ticking off indie filmmaking moves, and a poor example that young men used to try and get girls.
Frankly Wincing the Night Away was an album that protected The Shins from this toxic connection. There’s a new ambition in opener Sleeping Lessons that marks the album as superior to Oh Inverted Word and Chutes to Narrow. It’s a stunning slow burning opener that sets the album on its more serious course. A course that is both undermined, and enriched immediately by the two hit singles Australia and Phantom Limb. Both songs have front man James Mercer’s gifted free-associating lyrics that are cryptic and interpretive, and the type of musicianship that owes a considerable debt to The Smiths as well as American lo-fi gods Pavement. It’s the albums second half that may be the bands defining statement. On no other album in The Shins career will you find a better run of songs than Turn on Me through to album closer A Comet Appears.
Wincing the Night Away was The Shins album that did change your life, and not because Natalie Portman said so.
