Playlust Playlist, No. 14: Kicking The Shins and A Couple Other Legs

Huh. It's a whole damn event in Wales.

For this week’s playlist, I decided to finally learn about and listen to the rest of The Shins’ catalog. When someone first passed the two albums I know (and too well) - Chutes Too Narrow and Wincing the Night Away - I lost it a little and played both deep, deep into the ground, scattered some favorites across some CDs I made (thus burying those songs deeper into the ground). It was a good time, basically, until I ruined it…

…which means I’ve got something in common with The Shins’ front-man, James Mercer. I kid, I kid. At any rate, because I didn’t know…well, anything about the band - not even that Zach Braff helped make ‘em famous when he bought “New Slang” for his directorial debut, Garden State - everything I read this week was new to me. For people who kept current on music news just over a decade ago, it’ll be old news. I chose a path and walked it, etc.

Also, just to mention, future features in this project will bounce between bands I’ve listened to from, oh, call it somewhere around the middle of high school to circa 2015 - i.e., the point I stopped really collecting music and became one of the simps who streams everything - and the random new stuff that I’ve discovered since. Enough about me…let’s talk about The Shins!

Who They’re For
Fans of dense, metaphor-laden lyrics backed with an indie-rock sound that (generally) leans acoustic, but still has a reasonable poppiness and accessibility.

The Basics
The Shins actually started in Albuquerque, New Mexico as an off-shoot of another Mercer-fronted project - first Flake, then Flake Music. Wikipedia’s timeline on all this isn’t perfect, but it looks like most members of the collaborative Flake Music transferred over to the Mercer-dominated The Shins (and Flake Music permanently disbanded in 1999). While the membership shifted around a bit, the original members of The Shins included Mercer (guitar, vocals, songwriting), James Langford (bass), Martin Crandall (keys), and Jesse Sandoval (drums). The band was already tight and touring with a couple established acts - e.g., Cibo Matto and Modest Mouse - but they caught their first real break when Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman saw them open for Modest Mouse in San Francisco and offered to release a one-off single - which happened to be “New Slang.” That one single blew up big enough to give the band’s debut album, Oh, Inverted World (2001), a head of steam before it even dropped. And, when it did, it sold about 90,000 more units than Sub Pop expected (100,000) and the band took off. Mercer, who was never shy about licensing his music (what the hell? Get paid, son), boosted the band even more by dishing to McDonald’s for an ad that aired during the Tokyo Olympics in 2001. Mercer relocated to Portland, OR on the royalties, built a basement study for future recording, and started working on 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow…and replacing Langford with David Hernandez from a band called Scared of Chaka. Chutes Too Narrow actually charted (No. 86 on Billboard!), but then the whole Garden State thing happened and The Shins’ first two albums sold even more. The whole she-bang had enough momentum to carry over into Wincing the Night Away (2007), which reached (holy shit!) No. 2 on Billboard.

Playlust Playlist, March 2021, ft. Homeboy Sandman + a Top 10

[Ed. - For the sake of time constraints and my general sanity, this will be the last monthly playlist I post on this site. The next plan will be to post a weekly Top 10, plus ONE featured artist, because personal restraint and/or failure thereof. The biographical/programming notes will dry up at the same time. With that, here’s this month’s/week’s featured artist...]

Homeboy (Restless) Sandman
Who He’s For: Fans of indie hip-hop, lovers of complicated flows, topical and conceptual variety, and samples that from fluid to grating.

The Basics: Real name, Angel Del Villar II, Queens-based, born in 1980. He had enough sportz talent to go to UPenn (I think) on a basketball scholarship, but he dropped out for the proper college experience (parties and the ladies). Homeboy Sandman has lived abroad a couple times (the story about living in Sweden, but only half paying attention, when A$AP Rocky got arrested), but he’s pretty close to a five boroughs lifer. He came up in the New York scene via underground radio; by 2008, Source featured him as “unsigned hype.” A couple regular, sturdy gigs came his way - e.g., a stint running “ALL THAT, hip-hop, poetry and jazz” at the Nuyorican Café, a Youtube series he operated called “Homeboy Sandman presents Live From…” - but, in an extended interview with Hot97, he described his career as something closer to a series of accidents/accidental collaborations, things he backs into by the God’s grace. He’s also blunt about his method: he writes a rhyme when he needs money. That speaks to the volume of his discography, which includes 10 full LPs, nearly as many EPs and one, early mixtape. While I picked at a couple other albums, I spent real time on Actual Factual Pterodactyl (2008), Kindness for Weakness (2016), Humble Pi (2018), and Dusty (2019). I really tried with Don’t Feed the Monster, but that fucker is bleak (see, "Trauma"). Homeboy Sandman has a sharp-eyed and unflinching sense of humor and he points it both outward and inward, and he can phrase most ideas six different ways at a minimum. All that follows from a restless, anxious mind. One last thing: he referred to the version of himself that recorded Dusty as an “alter-ego.” And it sounds like it.