There is a reason Alyson Camus and I disagree so vehemently about the Shins, it is because Alyson loves the intricacies of pop arrangements and I love the immediacy of pop melody. James Mercer excels at the former and not so much the latter. But more important to his success than either, as the fans singing their hearts out at Terminal 4 on Monday attested, he is a great writer of hooks.
He is catchy.
Not handsome, too long winded to be smart, no good at catechesis's, and a lousy poet to boot -all of that is true, still Mercer knows when to start a song with "lalallalalaaaa" and when to add a hook to his chorus like a double shot of espresso to the pleasure zone. He tenses into the mic "Australia" and later on "New Slang" and allows the band and the audience to transport to a world when the Shins are a band that will change your life. It is about as moving as you can expect from a Shins concert, but in the end, it is people being hoodwinked by hooks.
And once the moment has passed, a band with zero stage presence and not much more than a really strong collective sound, bored me to tears in the terrifying confines of T5. Mercer said, "This is our second night here and it is going to be our best". In which case I assume he brought out an armchair and had a snooze the other nights. T5 looks like it could second for a detention camp in a movie where an American Diplomat is kidnapped by Chilean Armed Forces in the mid-1960s. It is a horrorshow.
The band does little to warm things up, in his anti-stylish everyman stance there is a chill to the over-intellectualized ho-hums off port Of Morrow and odds and sods, plus fan faves that make up the rest of the show It is a both slack and rigid at the same time: the leader pretends to be just another member of the band, but after firing his entire first band, nobody believes that for a start
The last time I saw the Shins they were unspeakably rotten and this time they aren't, maybe because my expectations were so low, still straining my neck for an hour to watch a band do nothing very exciting except, well the lighing isn't bad.
I was sick of this set before the second song, "Simple Song" -another hook in search of a melody, was over. And despite a surfeit of hits, you know the names, I didn't like it. I left after an hour.
Grade: B-
Ps: I am gonna grade myself here as well: C-. This was not a well written review.
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