The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
Paste Magazine Albums of The Decade #24
From Dusted Magazine
In Jonathan Franzen’s overrated best-seller The Corrections, there exists a sophisticated computer program that can identify patterns in someone’s favorite music and synthesize the data into new music that is guaranteed to satisfy. Only fiction? It seems that The Shins have gained access to this magical machine, and they keep pushing my buttons, over and over and over again.
The Albuquerque foursome first exercised this eerie power on me (and countless others) with 2001’s Oh, Inverted World, a stomach-stinging, bell-ringing cyanide bon-bon of a debut. The album stands as a diamond-perfect pop artifact. James Mercer and his merry popsters toured their cords off (supporting elder indie statesmen like Modest Mouse and Red House Painters), released a few singles, got canonized by every music critic from here to Hong Kong, and then had to face a promising young band’s greatest challenge: doing it all again. Like all excellent first albums, Oh, Inverted World invites skepticism at the thought of a repeating such a triumph. Enter the sophomore odds-wrecker: Chutes Too Narrow.
Get it.
