At 21 years of age this year and thus finally legal to drink – though many of us squinty-eye-suspect that it has been tippling a bit here and there ahead of officially having a mature ID – Oh, Inverted World was ready to party when it hit Atlanta’s The Eastern on Tuesday, August 16th amidst The Shins’ ongoing national tour-celebration of their nimble ne plus ultra. Oh, Inverted World is still the stone sluice of quietude-with-a-squall-in-its-eye that you remember if you were hip enough to encounter this band and its aerobically skittish sound before Natalie Portman sagely said to in Garden State.
The Shins back then were like the French symbolists of college radio – they had an innate irony that was cool in temperature rather than style, and Oh, Inverted World was not outlaw poetry so much as the firelit confession of a love speaking in side-mouth stutters. It crackled with Mercer’s droll glossematics counter-sprung against his inner animadversions, and the whole album felt blown in through a window with a moon fairy atop its back in 2001, full of misanthropic hopes washed up ashore of a lurid island laird, previously unmapped. Albuquerque-formed but Portland, Oregon-honed, The Shins have been called maudlin a bit more than is fair to their oft-jaunty and always-eccentric catalog. Their happy and high songs are simply attended by black rabbit pallbearers–and those in the know will remember that rabbits of any kind are good luck.
James Mercer is a kind of work-mystic with a flay in his face, and he sings his torn-flannel truths over the transom. His is a voice in viridian worsted, telling argent candy floss carols about the retributive nature of love and the ceremonial mockery we all tend to make of our own best ideas once in a while, most especially when we ourselves are also green as Granny Smiths at things like the general granularity of life.
Though The Boy from ‘Burque is the last man standing of the original band lineup that would have been responsible for the recording of Oh, Inverted World, the remainder of the first Shins having forcefully fallen away in the broader farce of what it really means to rock-n-roll all night and party every day, the modern-day Shins have mastered the same à rebours approach that gave that album a silence so elaborate as to inspire its emollient double within the chest. Comprised now of Yuuki Matthews (bass), Patti King (keyboards), Jon Sortland (drums), and Mark Watrous (guitars), The Shins of today are still here to sonically illustrate the divide between being disengaged versus being carefree. Most of Oh, Inverted World’s track list moves like yacht spars across the sky of that indiscernible-to-some line.
Opening the show were a local Portland trio of sisters called Joseph, composed of twins Meegan and Allison Closner alongside Natalie Closner Schepman. Bringing new meaning to any definition of blood harmony any lucky listener might have had prior to hearing their hypnotic howls, this is certainly a fledgling group worth your focused aural attention. Portland music, even the hardest of it, has always been its own ear-ecotype–and one decadently containing the yin of the ocean and the yang of the mountains. If Oh, Inverted World was the featurette of the Portland indie feeling of 2001, Joseph is the trailer for the literary-folkie franchise blockbuster that “the Portland sound” has become in the wake of hugely successful artists from that area such as She & Him, Modest Mouse, and The Decemberists. Both are great ‘movies’ that call for repeated viewings.
Having accidentally invented the now-ubiquitous subgenre of what perhaps only this writer refers to as “desert quirk-folk,” “Caring Is Creepy” and “New Slang” went down in Atlanta like serendipitous sightings of double Atlas moths. Even the parts of those songs that are forbidding in the way of fine-binding were sung along-to as though they were merely wistful stadium ballads. “Your Algebra” on this tour is no longer the acoustic agony column of salal and sword fern that it is on the recording, but rather shows up to the anniversary party dressed for church and accompanied by the heaven-high prairie harmonies of the Joseph sand-selkies.
With the stated intention for this tour being simply for The Shins to play the entirety of Oh, Inverted World in order from start to finish, many unsuspecting Atlanta fans were visibly thrilled by the inclusion of seven additional Shins shiners from other album eras, such as a rendition of “The Past And Pending” presented with an almost Neronian cast to it, “Phantom Limb” done like pleasant stellar death, and crowd favorites “Australia” and “Simple Song” sounding “metal” in the sense of actually convecting with electricity. By the time closer-encore “Sleeping Lessons” was faultlessly blended with Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” The Shins had created of their Atlanta adorers a swaying solar neighborhood all their own, and one all were loath to leave for the truly inverted world waiting outside the door at the end.
Setlist
Oh, Inverted World
1. Caring Is Creepy
2. One By One All Day
3. Weird Divide
4. Know Your Onion!
5. Girl Inform Me
6. New Slang
7. The Celibate Life
8. Girl On The Wing
9. Your Algebra
10. Pressed In A Book
11. The Past And Pending
Other Career-High Goodies
12. Pam Berry
13. Phantom Limb
14. Australia
15. Turn A Square
16. Saint Simon
17. Mine’s Not A High Horse
18. Simple Song
Encore
19. The Fear
20. Sleeping Lessons (intermixed with Tom Petty’s “American Girl”)
