Review Summary: Perfectly crafted, charmingly awkward, a must own.
It may be a little odd to admit it, but I consider myself a songwriter. Not a particularly good one mind you but one nonetheless. I write enough to get by and find myself improving with time but Chutes Too Narrow makes me want to give up. The song writing is so good, it’s like James Mercer throws down a gauntlet that after almost a decade, I have yet to hear its songwriting topped in terms of shear wit. Listening to Gone for Good, is particularly aggravating, “Just leave the ring on the rail/for the wheels to nullify”, yelps Mercer. In all likelihood I might never come close to writing a line that clever, much less a whole song.
The Shins are (were?) a five piece group from Albuquerque who caught the world by the ear with Oh, Inverted World!, a brilliant album of catchy tunes with lyrics deeper than they first appear. It was a great debut, but The Shins really came into their own here. The songs on Chutes Too Narrow often hop scotch between indie, country, and folk, occasionally in the same song and have hooks so huge you could catch a fish with them. Kissing The Lipless quickly gets bored of its acoustic arrangement and throttles it within the first minuet. Mine’s Not a High Horse rolls through the verse into the chorus, and it features one of those chorus hooks. The kind that gets stuck in your head for days and you just don’t mind. It’s just that good of a song. Track two and we may already have the album highlight. The remainder run a spectrum between fast driving rock n’ roll (So Says I, Fighting in a Sack), choral pop (Saint Simon), and folk (Young Pilgrims, Pink Bullets), bands often shoot for many different styles and usually end up being bad at all of them, The Shins could have built an album off of the styles explored on Chutes Too Narrow.
It feels appropriate to mention how important The Shins were; they provided a perfect entry point into indie music, even more so than similarly critically acclaimed indie bands like The Strokes and Interpol. The difference between those bands and The Shins were The Shins were not cool. They didn’t exude confidence or mystery, they were awkward and shy. It gave them a key relationship between them and their fans, the awkward and shy ones. Indie would be in a different place right now without The Shins, and they didn’t even have to make some huge stylistic change to do it either. Music like this has been made before, but it’s rarely felt this fresh. This is just a tightly packed collection of tunes you can hum all day long, don’t miss it, it might just change your life.
