The meaning of James Mercer’s songs has often been very mysterious to me, first, I have always listened to them without understanding anything of what he was singing, then, his cryptic poesy would make more or less sense, but at the end this is what I have always liked in a Shins’ song: bright music, full of darkness and unveiled revelations.
But this new album, ‘Port of Morrow’, is curiously not that cryptic, the lyrics have never been more straightforward, after all the time it took me to figure out ‘Phantom Limb’ and its enigmatic message of lesbians’ suffering via missing male limb – and even now who knows if I got it right? – these new songs have a more forthright life. Just take ‘The Rifle’s Spiral’, which opens the album, there are too many body parts mentioned, ‘dead lungs’, ‘grey eyes’, ‘viscera unfurls’, ‘two veins from your heart', 'a dagger floating/straight to their heart’ for not being about some subway suicide-bomber rising from his ‘burning fiat’, responsible of an apocalyptic vision way too common these days. The song sounded cryptic at first, but was way easier to figure out than usual.
Lyrics apart, the music of ‘Port of Morrow’ sounds extremely familiar, it is as fresh and charming as The Shins’ music has always been, there is brilliance, guitars layered with keyboards, wordless harmonies, inventive jumpy noises, earworms and big choruses, yes all this, with a twist.
It is the first Shins album in five years, without the old cast – keyboard player Marty Crandall, drummer Jesse Sandoval, and bassist Dave Hernandez – and somehow it is the typical Portland band’s sound with the hooks blossoming at each tune and that poppy wide-eyed-putting-a smile-in-your face sound instantaneously filling the space, but it is also different. There are songs that do not exactly sound like The Shins and that venture into some 70s rock or even R&B/soul genre….
The brand new band does not exactly bother me, since The Shins’ music has always been James Mercer’s personal work and his innate sense of melodies but there is something going on here, time has passed, he got married with kids, hired his new crew (Richard Swift, guitarist Jessica Dobson, bassist Yuuki Matthews, and drummer Joe Plummer), switched labels from Sub Pop to his own Aural Apothecary, tried a falsetto, and expanded his indie sound, sometimes for the best, other times for the worst, although the worst in Mercer’s world is still quite good!
For example, he has never wrote a more triumphant, confident and joyous song, than ‘Simple Song’, I want this song played when I win a race or something! The music is large-screen-jubilant-power-pop that is actually anything but simple in its musical delivery; the only simple thing may be its straightforward love song message, ‘Love’s such a delicate thing that we do/with nothing to prove’.
Indeed, happy married life seems to have brought good things as there are a few love songs on this album, like ‘September’, a sweet ballad whose breezy melody breathes the sea and the sun and whose poetic lyrics intertwine his love for his wife with his surrounding, ‘And love is the ink in the well when her body writes’, or ‘And now when the sun goes down she sheds a darling light’.
However, if several songs on the album sound like typical Shins songs, the first time I heard ‘It’s only Life’, I thought there was something unusual here, at least unusual for Mercer, as if he was succumbing for once at easy-listening and was writing a too-easy-to-figure-out song, not that I don’t like it anyway. ‘Bait and Switch’ brings a playful dance number, with its bouncy, wavy melody and inventive lines like ‘Two weeks on and my spine was in traction/My eyes in a basket’. ’For a fool’ has this strange-country-singer beginning that morphs into one of the most powerful hooks of the album when he sings ‘Taken for a foo-oo-ool’, whereas ‘Fall of 82’ shows some departure from the Shins’ signature sound, curiously has a narrative construction so unusual for Mercer, and even has some Paul Simon-esque tone (I say this without being able to pinpoint what exact Simon’s song it reminds me) when Mercer sings ‘Had you never been my friend/I wouldn't be quite what you see/I wouldn't be the man I am’.
Even with more direct lyrics, the songs are still personal, evoking his childhood’s memory about Germany and child prostitutes (he talked about this in an interview) in the nostalgic '40 Mark Strasse’, a strange animal with a soul-croon mixed a brief floating Pink-Floyd-esque element. But often, the songs offer a larger perspective on life – the serious consequence of having kids – being more concerned about the modern world, worrying about possible violence in the subway (‘The Rifle’s Spiral’), or about the economic decline (‘No Way Down’) in which he advises us to ‘Get used to their dust in your lungs’, just before this middle-song bright solo guitar.
Like it or not, ‘Port of Morrow’ is the new sound of The Shins, unfolding song after song this duality of life that Mercer has talked about in interviews; the songs are both happy and dark, exhilarating and melancholic, a dichotomy summarized in the lines of the title song which closes the album ‘And there are flowers in the garbage, and a skull under your curls’, beauty tangling with death as if Mercer could not believe in his own happiness.