Released: 2007
Music is always at it’s best when it’s unashamedly borrowing from something. By the middle of the decade Vampire Weekend had respectfully looted afropop (And Paul Simon’s Graceland), whilst across town MGMT were doubling down on their evident fondness for Low-era Bowie, Prince and Suicide.
The Shins came from hipster Portland, but the quartet’s roots were in the desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where guitarist/singer/songwriter James Mercer, Dave Hernandez (bass), Marty Crandall (keys) and Jesse Sandoval (drums) met in 1997. Their debut album Oh, Inverted World started critical tongues wagging about a renaissance in what America knew as indie, forming a doppelganger to the sleazy coke tinged rock coming out of Brooklyn. These proclamations were initailly met with cynicism, but then it’s 2004 follow up Chutes Too Narrow seemed to confirm the notion, with their rivals from the East Coast already headed for rehab.
2007’s Wincing the Night Away went even further, winning them a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album, with Mercer as he termed it “stretching out” his songwriting thematically. Selling more copies than the entire rest of the Sub Pop catalogue in the first week of it’s release, it opened with Phantom Limb, a case in point. Handsomely inflected with wall-of-sound drums and even a space for handclaps, Mercer kept it surreal through via some weird lyrical allegories, but the track also – if you wanted it to – took on the assumed the rockist mantle some of their breathless fans had sworn to defend against. No matter though if they sounded less or more like someone else. Because all musical property is theft, as all great songwriters know.
The Voice Of Unreason 