Review Summary: Just last night I woke from some unconscionable dream/had it nailed to my forehead again
Looking back, it’s pretty easy to categorize the music that was important to me in my late-teens: I loved stuff that sounded angry and sad because I was angry and sad. At least, I liked the idea of being angry and sad, and wanted to surround myself with things that validated my own self-image. So, I gravitated towards records that were loud and cathartic. At the time, I thought
The Monitor was the greatest album ever made because I was a 15 year old in New Jersey when it came out. I wanted to be screamed at that I would always be a loser and that it’s still us against them and that there isn’t a boy in this town that’s not exploding with hate because I thought all that was true. Even the revelatory joy of an album like
Celebration Rock, I thought, was rooted in a sense of desperation, the knowledge that the best moments—drinking and laughing with your friends, playing music—were fleeting, and that those feelings couldn’t possibly carry over into the rest of your life, no matter how great the songs you wrote about them were.
I don’t know why I listened to
Chutes Too Narrow for the first time at 16 or so. I was a pretty avid Pitchfork reader and guess that I was just working through their best of the 2000s list, which I took as canon. But I quickly connected to it, finding in its songs the thoughts I was having, despite the music having none of the outward aggression that I thought went hand in hand with them. Of course, I’m oversimplifying things a bit here. I also had an appreciation for more traditional indie rock, and I was certainly aware of the well-trodden concept of the happy sounding pop song serving as a trojan horse for difficult feelings. But I didn’t feel like that was the case for these songs. Rather, I saw their bright, somewhat cutesy casings, including the almost ironically cartoonish album cover, as the high end of a more complex whole. Hearing James Mercer sing over a simple acoustic guitar, plainly and prettily, “I know there is this side of me that/wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just fly the whole mess into the sea,” I realized that I could hear myself in music that didn’t engage in what seemed like the requisite masculine posturing.
The songs of
Chutes Too Narrow are built on the familiar structures of pop, indie rock, folk, and country, and the effectiveness with which they are executed allows anyone who appreciates good songwriting to ease into them. But Mercer inserts just enough of his own flourish to keep things from becoming pastiche (this happens almost immediately on “Kissing the Lipless”, where a familiar sounding acoustic strum is nearly sawed in half by an electric guitar). And his vocal melodies are so damn good that this record would still be worthwhile even if they were the only praiseworthy thing about it.
But, almost in opposition to the music, Mercer’s default lyrical mode here is a skeptical eye towards authority: religion, capitalism, hell—even friends he deems too sanctimonious for his liking. “Don’t ask for his opinion/they ought to drown him in holy water,” he mutters on “Mine’s Not a High Horse” over a wandering synth riff. On “So Says I”, his opinions on the human condition are more grandiose: “We got rules and maps and guns in our backs/ but we still can’t just behave ourselves/even if to save our own lives.” In short, “we are a brutal kind.” Later, on "Young Pilgrims", the target is free will—"there's no design/no flaws to find."
Taking these lyrics out of context, it might appear that Mercer’s attitude here is too strident. I will even admit that he’s probably being a bit of a know-it-all (another reason I saw myself in this album at 16). But like any know-it-all worthy of listening to, Mercer is not without some self awareness, or at least some self-deprecation. He imagines, for example, on the aptly-named “Pink Bullets”, “a movie so crass and awkwardly cast/that even [he] could be the star.” And while Mercer’s lyrics are often clinical, he’s not averse to sentimentality. “Mercy’s eyes are blue,” he coos, (and later wails) on “Saint Simon”, “when she places them in front of you,” surrounding his hymn with strings and angelic backing vocals. Even on the album closer, an acoustic ballad that laments the human race as beings that “propagate only to die”, Mercer ruefully whistles the melody as the song fades out, as if to undercut his own premise with a “well, them’s the breaks.”
And that’s the key to these songs: coexistence. On “Gone for Good”, Mercer gleefully plays the forlorn country singer, as his protagonist “leave[s] the ring on the rail/ for the wheels to nullify”. Then, he turns philosophical in the chorus, finding “a fatal flaw in the logic of love.” It’s a delicate balance that Mercer would never quite strike again. Personally, I find that the other Shins albums, most of which are still good, have a sort of affectation—call it twee, call it whatever—that puts me at a remove. I don’t find any trace of that on
Chutes Too Narrow. Everything is clear, both sonically and lyrically, even if the songs are catchy enough that the album could be enjoyed ignoring the words entirely.
Does that clarity and coexistence make
Chutes Too Narrow an inherently better album than, say,
The Monitor? Of course not. There is a time and place for cathartic rock anthems and there is a time for pristine indie songs, just as there is a place for anger and sadness in both. But
Chutes Too Narrow taught me that neither the music nor the feeling has to be definitive.
