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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Shins

The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow came out 63 years after Hemingway published his Spanish Civil War novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls." 

Autumn and The Shins; a tale of two antipodes

Oct. 21, 1772: English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born.

Oct. 21, 1805: The Battle of Trafalgar occurs.

Oct. 21, 1892: Opening ceremonies for the World’s Columbian Exhibition are held, although it doesn’t open for real until May 1, 1893.

Oct. 21, 1929: Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin is born.

Oct. 21, 1940: Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” is published.

Oct. 21, 1959: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opens to the public.

Oct. 21, 1969: Beat author Jack Kerouac dies.

Oct. 21, 2003: Elliott Smith dies and The Shins release Chutes Too Narrow.

What is there to a season? I don’t have an admitted favorite, although I will say that summer is a drag with its sweating inertia, suitable for neither work nor leisure. Winter has the holidays and spring has the flowers. But then there is autumn.

Fall is such a horrendous name, for a number of reasons. Chiefly: You can’t use “fall” as an adjective, which is the only way we can really understand seasons anyway viz. seasons are defined by their relation to other things. Autumn has no shape until you fix it to things like “the autumn wind” or “the autumn leaves.”

It’s fair to say that autumn can be used to describe music as well. After all, the commingling of warm and cold days without descent into some wan tepidity, the smell of leaves and the feel of walking across beds of them, are singularly evocative in these temperate climes. It follows that an “autumnal album” would evoke similar feelings—the fraught balance between antipodes.

Of all albums that may be termed “autumnal,” Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins ranks high on my list of favorites. It was one of the first albums I ever bought and it is one which I have kept returning to.

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I am not an avowed Shins fan. Oh, Inverted World glimmers with blotches of incandescence, but is otherwise anemic from the harrows of hype—dam of the devil. Wincing the Night Away fares better, without the encumbrance of songs like “New Slang” or “Caring is Creepy.” Port of Morrow is, um, Port of Morrow. Chutes Too Narrow, on the other hand, is so consistently great that I wonder how Mercer and co. managed it.

It’s like Oh, Inverted World without all the bedroom pellucidities. It’s like Wincing the Night Away without all the generalized weight. Mercer and co. found a pretty perfect ideal between sparse performance and the over ponderous—intellectual antipodes.

Songs like “Kissing the Lipless,” “Saint Simon” and “Pink Bullets” have an oneiric quality which is not well matched in The Shins canon—evocative and off the cuff heartfelt without succumbing to the pratfalls of over thought twee. The rock songs rollick (“So Says I”) or tremble (“Turn a Square”) or careen (“Fighting in a Sack”) with their own gaits.

Lines pop out and surprise without seeming like they were engineered for surprise. Lines like “Called to see if your back/Was still aligned and your sheets /Were growing grass/All on the corners of your bed,” from “Kissing the Lipless.” Lines like “Since then it’s been a book/You read in reverse/So you understand less as the pages turn,” from “Pink Bullets.” Not the gold standard of lyricism, but a touch better than most.

The tenor of Chutes Too Narrow is hard to sum up. Sad? Some parts of it. Joyful? Yeah, patches. Mournful? Maybe that one song. That amorphousness is what sums up its autumnal qualities.

Autumn is a crucible of the seasons, emotions, antipodes, life. Whether, in the end, you end up with some useful alloy or useless scoria depends on your sensibilities. Some people like things static. Others prefer some sort of dynamism. For me, that’s what autumn is: dynamism. And Chutes Too Narrow exemplifies autumnal dynamism.

Other albums released this day: Car Alarm by The Sea and Cake (2008), Logic Will Break Your Heart by The Stills (2003), Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? by The Unicorns (2003), Stronger by Kelly Clarkson (2011), Bad As Me by Tom Waits (2011).

Think Oh, Inverted World is the better album? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.

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