Albums2010 Revisited: Oh, Inverted World!

The real question that I am afraid to ask is this: does Garden State still hold up after all these years? Natalie Portman puts the headphones on Zach Braff and says "This song will change your life" and honestly, it does and you can't listen to this album and not think about Garden State. But at the same time, it's more than just Garden State. The Shins to me are like a time machine, an instant slice of life that was college. 

Technically, this album is a new entry in the Albums2010 canon.  I went back and checked the archives- it turns out that while the Garden State Soundtrack did make the cut, I didn't go back and find this album at all. (There's a chance it made the cut of the lost entries between #68-#80. but those are lost forever in the wilds of cyberspace thanks to the Unfortunate Wordpress Experiment.)

I think this is a great album, but what I found myself struggling with is how to describe this band. It sort of fits into a variety of genres and if you want to call it 'indie rock' you wouldn't be wrong, but I also don't listen to enough music to know entirely what that means. The three singles that I know best probably sum up my struggle quite nicely:

'Caring Is Creepy' opens the album and it's jangly and soaring and unique. But then you compare that to 'New Slang' which is more subdued and quiet. And in between you've got 'One by One All Day' which not only makes reference to the album's title in the lyrics ("You were no ordinary drain on her defenses/And she was no ordinary girl/Oh, Inverted World") but also brings an entirely different sensibility to the music. 

You would think by my admittedly poor description that this album sounds like a hot mess, but it really doesn't. Lead singer James Mercer writes very good lyrics (they might lean a little too heavily into the metaphor for a lot of people, but I like them) and I think that, more than anything is what underpins this album. The lyrics (which various sources on the internet describe as 'vivid' and 'surrealist' seem to be the building blocks for the sound of this album. (Though the band's wiki page also has a quote from Rolling Stone, crediting the band with bringing "the pop traditions of 1960s pop bands- groups like the Zombies, and the Beach Boys- to a new generation of music fans.")

That last quote is more or less the perfect way to describe this band, though-- and Mercer himself has described them as a 'pop project' so I'm not quite sure where the 'indie rock' label comes in. 

I listen to a lot of bands that I would go see live if I got a chance, but aren't exactly 'bucket list' level for me and I think The Shins might fall into this category. I could see myself picking up a couple more of their albums, perhaps (there are a few more or their songs on later albums that I wouldn't mind having in the collection) but I think that this album might be my favorite. It's a slice of time that I can (obviously) never get back, but still makes me smile at the memories.