I Know Things Can Really Get Rough When You Go it Alone

Nothing ever lives up to expectations after being overhyped. After a bunch of Emmy’s and every critic raving over it like it was written by Jesus itself, I decided to give Mad Men a chance and was bored to death. Nothing happened, Don Draper is a humongous douchebag, and the acting from Betty Draper and Pete Campbell are so horrible is surprising that they are not currently employed by The CW. Could I have liked Mad Men more if people had not over sold it before I watched it? Possibly, the further I got away from the hype, the more I have enjoyed the show.

Possibly the worst case of overhyping came courtesy of Natalie Portman eight years ago when she proclaimed to the world that The Shins would change your life. Naturally you just had to give Caring Is Creepy a listen and there was no way not to be let down no matter how much you liked it. It had a nice wall of sound and encapsulated the indie movement about to pop, but in no way life changing. It surprisingly took them three years after the release of Garden State to release their next album and essentially broke up after that when lead singer James Mercer replaced the entire band and started recording with Danger Mouse as Broken Bells.

Mercer is back with an entirely new backing band still on the name The Shins (five years since he last used the name) for his first post Danger Mouse work with new album Port of Morrow. Though he did not produced the album (that was done by Greg Kurstin of The Bird and the Bee) or play any instruments on it but Danger Mouse’s influence if felt on the album with a more consorted effort to use electronic instrumentation than in previous incarnations of The Shins. Even the title track could have fit easily on the Broken Bells album.

The added textures are felt all over the album like on the album’s lead single Simple Song which sonically anything but with a lot going on in the background. The simple motif continues during Bait and Swich whe Mercer tries to claim, “I’m just a simple man.” September almost goes the opposite route from Simple Song as an actual simple and sweet song. While Fall of '82 sounds like something out of the Steely Dan catalogue. The Shins may never change many lives, they are still putting out solid albums.

Song to Download - Fall of '82

Port of Morrow gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.