A Free Man

“Though I knew you masked your disdain.
I can see that change was just too hard for us,
Hard for us.
You always had to hold the reins,
But where I’m headed, you just don’t know the way.

The Shins - “Turn On Me”

I thought it would be fun to combine posts today, so I played Z my second favorite album of the year - The Shins - “Wincing the Night Away.”

One note on our contest. Y’all aren’t doing so well, though the 50 Cent contingent has certainly had its say - you’re like Ron Paul people. Anyway, as a hint, I played my favorite album of 2007 to Z and his reaction was mixed. And, yes, you can have another post hint guess. Here are the contest details again:

I’ve decided to run a little contest as a thanks for my readers. I will give away your choice of one of my top 10 albums or those that got an honorable mention in either mp3 or CD format. All that you have to do is guess what my number one will be for 2007 and attach that guess as a comment to this post. I will select one of the correct guesses at random after I name the number one on Friday. The deadline for entry is 11 p.m. (Greenwich Mean Time) on Thursday, December 20.

Just a reminder of where we are in the countdown:

10. M.I.A. - “Kala”
9. Modest Mouse - “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”
8. Frank Turner - “Sleep Is For The Week”
7. Wilco - “Sky Blue Sky”
6. Bruce Springsteen - “Magic”
5. Spoon - “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”
4. Jason Isbell - “Sirens of the Ditch”
3. Okkervil River - “The Stage Names”

Last autumn we had a miniature Portland invasion in Oxford with The Decemberists and The Shins playing in town within a week of each other. The former group was gearing up to release their major label debut and were a band on the rise - and they did a fantastic live show. The Shins on the other hand had not released an album in the nearly three years since their sophomore effort “Chutes Too Narrow”. Until I saw that they were playing Oxford Brookes Student Union I kind of thought they had gone the way of so many promising bands before them - a couple of albums and then disappear. After seeing their live show, I though that may be a good thing. They weren’t musically horrible, just dull and unengaging.

Some bands do their best work in the studio and a few months later when The Shins released their third full length record - “Wincing the Night Away” - I was immediately reminded of why I spent an evening at Brookes yawning the night away. Their first two albums were fractious collections of academic indie pop songs - just my cup of tea and still two of my favorite records for easy listening. With their third, however, The Shins cast a different sort of spell, a homogenous sounding record that sounds like a coherent “album oriented” effort. It’s gentle and euphoric yet vaguely disturbing at the same time. As a listener, you find yourself hypnotized by the soft, lilting instrumentation and the dreamy pace of the album. It veers between jangly, three minute R.E.M.-esque pop songs and noodling prog-rock electronic soundscapes - a recipe for disaster in less talented hands, but The Shins manage to pull it off. They take things to the edge of Overproduced Cliff, but pull up short of a plummet into that ravine. Put all this together and you’ve got the second best album of 2007.

If Z’s reaction is any gauge then “Wincing the Night Away” seems to be a kid friendly album - musically if not lyrically. It’s all major chords and tambourines and synthesized fun noises laid over the gentle, lolloping Shins rhythm. Z loved tracks like “Phantom Limb” (tambourines and “Woohoo”-ing) and “Red Rabbits” (despite lyrics like “Out of a gunnysack for red rabbits/Into the crucible to be rendered an emulsion”). The brevity of this album - just over 35 minutes - is definitely a bonus for young kids and their short attention spanned Dads.

Have a listen to “Australia” - my favorite for a number of reasons - and if you like it then the full album is a must. “Wincing the Night Away” is available from and Amazon.

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Thanks for help with contest promotion:

• Matt at Contest Beat
• My Blog Contest

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