Oh, Inverted Band

  SubPop Records The Shins will be rocking out at the
Troubador this Thursday night.

By Andrew Lee
Daily Bruin Contributor 

By all logical estimations, The Shins’ self-produced debut
album “Oh, Inverted World” shouldn’t have
garnered as much adulation as it did last year. The band itself
began as nothing more than singer James Mercer’s two-member
side project, an entity always seen as second to Flake, his main
group for four years.

But in retrospect, the story of Mercer’s musical
evolution, which he’ll showcase Thursday at the Troubadour,
shows that some things are just destined for change.

“In Flake we would just go into the basement and drink
beers and write songs,” Mercer said, on the phone from his
home in Portland. “There were a few times when someone would
write an entire song and introduce it to the band, but by and
large, we would just jam.”

Judging from Mercer’s summation, the band was trying to
emulate the apathetic indie-rock slop that epitomized the scene in
the ’90s. Perhaps because of this, Mercer insists that the
more meticulously song-oriented Shins was never intended to be a
serious project. But now Mercer and his bandmates are bringing
their crafted pop tunes to some of their biggest audiences
ever.

That’s not to say Flake wasn’t heard outside
Mercer’s basement, at least not entirely. The band was in
respectable company from the beginning, opening for Modest Mouse on
its first tour in 1996.

“It was just one of those miserable experiences where you
just play puppet show after puppet show,” Mercer said.
“We ended up in Chico, Calif., in this tiny little bar, where
the stage was right next to the entrance, so there was about 10
feet of space to watch the band. But people were always coming and
going through the door so it was just the most uncomfortable
thing.”

In spite of the hardships, four years later Flake got a call
from Modest Mouse asking them to open for the band for three nights
in Texas. It was around this time that the Shins, made up
originally of Mercer and friend Dave Hernandez, started to grow
into more than just a side project.

“The next time that they had us out we played a couple
Flake songs and then after that we played some Shins songs as
well,” Mercer said.

Flake members Jesse Sandoval and Marty Crandall would eventually
join Mercer’s evolving project, and Hernandez would soon
leave the band, making way for the final Flake member, Neal
Langford to join the ranks. In essence, with the dissolution of
Flake came the Shins, a different band nevertheless consisting of
Flake’s original lineup.

Amidst this twisted version of musical chairs, a CD of Shins
demos eventually made its way to a friend’s hands, who in
turn handed it to an executive at Sub Pop records. Only after the
label offered the band a record contract did Mercer fully realize
the potential of the group.

“At that point we realized, “˜Oh, wow, I guess
we’re gonna have to tour, which means we’ll have to
sort of be a real band,'” Mercer said.

In spite of the lack of change in band members, Mercer is quick
to point out the differences between his old and new group. The
latter, he explains, was his opportunity to finally craft songs
instead of letting them fall in place during a jam session.

And true to that claim, “Oh, Inverted World” offers
something completely different from Flake’s output. With the
help of some Casio keyboards and other primitive electronics, the
Shins turned out a pastiche of summery psychedelics in the spirit
of ’60s pop groups like Love and The Zombies, complete with
stream-of-consciousness lyrics about girls, onions, and algebra.
Surrealism abounds, most notably with “Your Algebra,” a
short dreary number that evokes an atmosphere of a foggy
otherworld.

“One night, I woke up at three in the morning and I was
just messing around with my guitar when I came up with that,”
Mercer explains. “I thought it would be interesting to try
and duplicate some sort of gothic chorus, or monks in a choir. Then
I imagined someone walking through the subway, where it’s
really cold and wet and he comes across these people singing and
begging for money and sort of lamenting out this weird
song.”

To contrast the Alice in Wonderland-type quirkiness,
Mercer’s voice hints at the claustrophobia-induced urgency of
The Cure’s Robert Smith, alternating from soaring melody
lines (“Girl on the Wing”) to hushed, pensive
inflections (“The Past and Pending”). Soft-spoken
Mercer primarily attributes the strained vocal style to his natural
anxiety toward being on stage.

“I remember one time in Albuquerque, at our first show
with about 300 people, and I got so nervous that I couldn’t
feel my hands,” Mercer said. “I actually was numb, and
I was playing guitar, too. I just felt totally disconnected.

“But it’s a lot better now,” he said.

“Oh, Inverted World” features a number of upbeat
tracks, but the song that has garnered the most attention,
“New Slang,” is one of the album’s most sedate.
McDonald’s was attracted to the melancholy sound, and
recently acquired rights to use the song in one of its commercials.
Mercer’s decision to allow the use of the song required some
deliberation, but he freely points out his dissension toward the
general indie-scene consensus regarding music and corporations.

“From my point of view, morally I have nothing against
it,” Mercer said. “But the perceptions are there
amongst a lot of people. It’s kind of strange, because what I
used to feel about the “˜punk ethic’ was basically that
it just meant nihilism, which was just not caring about anything,
in which case selling your song to McDonald’s is the perfect
punk rock thing to do.

“People take the music business way too seriously,”
Mercer continues. “Everybody: bands, fans, the people making
money off of it. It’s a really fickle, ridiculous business
that I’ve involved myself in.”

Apparently, the punk rock ethos that Mercer gleaned from his
days as a teenager in Britain is still very much a part of his
mindset. What results from it all is a band focused on the art of
the meticulously crafted three-minute pop song, steeped in a more
modern sense of free-wheeling apathy.

It’s an unusual compromise, and it only took two tries to
get it right.