the shins' albums are a collection of songs that can envelop you and coax you into feeling all warm & cosy with wistful unexplainable melodies and nostalgia and thoughts of charlotte from your year 9 art class whose eyes were like moonlit lakes. listen to them and "they'll change your life" as natalie portman's character says in Garden State.
the shins hardly ever tour, and tickets to their gigs are as hard to come by as a date with the aforementioned charlotte (or natalie portman for that matter - even more's the pity). However my good buddy 'the whackwit' fluked some earlier this year & I managed to step out of work early enough to sample a pint of swedish pear cider before they played.
much as i love their recordings, i have to say i was a little disappointed by the live show. i suppose i was hoping for that enveloping sound, i was hoping to stand in a room of music swaying slowly with my eyes closed in a room of sober, like-minded individuals. not so my friend, not so.
there seems to be a tendency that when bands like the shins perform live, they feel they need to 'liven' up their music, make it noisier and apparently more exciting. it's a shame, because the reason I like them is precisely for the mellowed demeanour of their recordings. if you distort the guitars and put the volume to 11, you destroy the mellow, and replace it with something resembling a bad cover band. though I hate hate hate to say it about a band that I otherwise love, that's a bit like what happened here.
perhaps slightly more unforgivable was the performance itself. the chaps pretty much bluntly refused to engage with the audience, simplifying the show to standing there and churning out the music with next to no personality showing through, bar david hernandez on guitar who jumped about a bit. i love this band, but sad to say it, left this gig feeling a little bit cheated.
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