The polyphonic twee

In the soulless opulence of a central London hotel, James Mercer of The Shins is reflecting on the day a dead rock star walked into his life.

“Elliot Smith used to rent the house in Portland, Oregon where I now live and where I put together all of the songs on the current album,” he says. “One day, an old girlfriend of Elliot’s called to my door. She told me he had lived there for some years. I was pretty knocked back. Apparently, he would record in the basement. Did that creep me out? Not at all. I found it inspiring.”
If you came late to The Shins it’s likely you were turned onto the band by one of the most blatant pieces of product placement in music history – in 2004 Natalie Portman lauded Mercer’s crew as the band “that will change your life” in the cute/sickly indie-flick Garden State (Zach Braff, the film’s director, is a lifelong indie-phile).
Sitting down to write The Shins’ first post-Garden State album, Mercer realised he’d been handed a one-shot opportunity. Return with the right record and the millions introduced to The Shins by Garden State would flock to the group. Fumble the pass and all that good publicity might be squandered.
“There was pressure, I guess, after Garden State,” admits Mercer, 37, who put The Shins together in New Mexico in 1997. “That said, it wasn’t negative pressure. We knew that there was a potential audience out there for us that had never previously existed. I saw that as an opportunity rather than a burden.”
His optimism proved justified. Released just a month ago, Wincing The Night Away has already gone platinum in the United States, debuting at number two in the Billboard chart (making it, by several orders of magnitude, the most successful album in the history of Sub Pop records).
“It’s nice, but I don’t read too much into it,” says Mercer, speaking so softly it sometimes sounds as if he's lapsed into an enigmatic silence when, in fact, he's merely paused for breath. “You gotta stay grounded. Otherwise you can’t keep doing what it is you do.”
Listening to Wincing, it’s immediately clear that the project represents a major leap forward for Mercer (who basically is The Shins – he writes and arranges all of the music). On their two previous records, 2001’s Oh Inverted World, and 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow, the four-piece trafficked in sweet, slight indie-pop: contrary to what Portman claimed this was emphatically not music to change your life, though it might brighten your afternoon a little.
On Wincing, however, Mercer really steps up to the plate. Reaching unabashedly beyond the indie heartland, towards a wider music public, the record is awash with surging choruses and devastating melodies. At the same time, it's also the darkest Shins album to date. Recorded after a spell of upheaval in Mercer’s life (its gestation coincided with, among other things, the end of a long-term relationship), Wincing, for all the surface glimmer, has a chilling undertow.
“Some of the songs came out of a period when I was living next to a crack house in Portland,” he elaborates. “It was what you would call an ‘up and coming’ neighbourhood – the landlord told me it was in the process of being gentrified. Well, guess what? It wasn’t gentrified yet. It was kind of scary because there were always drug dealers and addicts hanging out on the street. People would call the police on them. What terrified me was that they might get the idea that I was the guy who was calling the cops! In the end I had to move out ‘cos it was getting seriously scary. When I was away on tour, there was a drive-by shoot-out. I thought to myself, ‘Woah, this is waay too real.’”
Wincing The Night Away is out on Sub Pop/Transgressive.