The Shins

To say I was nervous about seeing The Shins live would be an understatement. It’s almost like finally sitting next to that guy on the bus you’ve had a crush on from a distance since highschool and maybe, just maybe, even exchanging a few words. Will it live up to the expectation? All that time spent with the stereo or ipod blaring, forming a far better soundtrack for your life than you could have ever come up with. Is it too huge a task then, for them to live up to the colossal ideal you have in your head after three glorious melody-and-harmony-laden albums that all but served to define the precocious and awkward stage known as your 20’s?

Let’s add to the mix some unsavoury whispers I caught on the wind by friends and acquaintances about some of their live performances last time they swung onto our shores; and I was more than a little relieved to have missed any performance that potentially could have shattered the comfort I took in the sounds of these four guys who look just as dorky as I feel most of the time.

Imagine my uncertainty then as I approached the Enmore on Friday night, armed with nothing more than a few drinks under my belt and the fervent and fragile wish that the little flame inside me that burns merrily along to James Mercer’s oft-absurd lyrics (I still can’t decipher what he’s on about half the time) and earnest melodies would not be dampened by an inferior live performance.

My kind readers, I do not need to elaborate further about my utter misapprehension other than to say that thankfully, any fears I had prior to these four guys ambling on stage on Friday night went unfounded, for to put it simply…they were pretty darn good.

More than once was I frozen to the spot, mouth agape and confused as to how Mercer could (vocally) sound so great live when let’s face it, sometimes on the records he sounds like he’s barely going to make some of those notes. Shocked was I to see that the glue that binds the Shins together in the flesh seems to be keyboardist Martin Crandall who nicely fills and plumps up the songs, continuously taking them well into technicolour territory. What would they do without him in a live show, I shudder to think.

Even more shocked was I to hear them playing a good balance of songs from all three albums. You would think that the older nuggets would get more enthusiastic responses from a crowd that has had years to digest them, not so…even the newbies like ‘phantom limb’ slipped comfortably in between their older siblings with the confidence that they had every right to be there, and rightly so.

We smiled, we clapped, we smiled some more, I profess to a couple of hand-on-the-heart moments (well, it was ‘new slang’ and ‘gone for good’ how could I not?). We laughed and sung our guts out (‘girl inform me’) and we watched, a little overwhelmed as they thrashed away with ‘kissing the lipless’. The endearing thing was that the Shins seemed just as pleasantly surprised by our reactions as we were by watching them.
And lastly, as though you needed any other hallmark of a truly remarkable gig; it felt like they only performed for about 25 minutes.

Seeing their bashfully pleased faces on stage at the end of the show made me think that maybe it’s not a 20’s thing for me anymore, maybe we are still bored and slumped over our desks in geography, only this time the dorks are way cooler and more likely to say something really interesting to you on the bus.

-Maria Savvidis

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