The Shins Album Review - Wincing the Night Away

I had resigned myself to wait until January to get this album since that is when it "officially" comes out. However, a little curiousity landed me on a file sharing site reluctanty searching for the damn thing. I felt a little self-indulgent since I typically search for leaked material to no avail and I had promised myself I would just WAIT this time. This time I found it! There it was looming at me from my Limewire interface...all 11 tracks! Like a kid at fat camp that just found a stash of Little Debbie's, I jumped right in. I was a little disappointed that it was this easy to find! I made a vow then and there that I would buy the album when it came out. I prefer to only pirate music that I wouldn'tnormally buy.

To give a little background here, I started listening to the Shins after reading in Pitchfork and other music media sites how good Chutes Too Narrow was. So I bought it on a whim. I can't say I liked it right away, but I seemed to find another track I liked every week and I always would come back to the album. The vocals that I found a little whiny at first became powerful and venerable; the lyrics confounded me and I found myself memorizing them so when I sang along I didn't have to make up sounds that sounded somewhat close to James Mercer's cryptic prose. I was hooked. I listened to them non-stop for several months, turning on as many friends as I could and learning to play guitar on as many songs as possible. I bought Oh, Inverted World by the time Garden State came out and saw the Shins in concert. Then, it all kind of dried up. I was burned out on the Shins I had but yearned for more. A couple of years later, there I was with a pirated copy of Wincing the Night Away! Finally.