Ace of base
James Mercer turns his experiences as a homesick US air force kid into pop gold on the first Shins album since 2012. By James McNair. Illustration by Michael Weldon.
It’s not the kind of pop gold he’s known for, but like Buddy, Chuck or Marc, Shins linchpin James Mercer can hew magic from the most familiar of 12-bar structures. That much is clear listening to Mildenhall, a relaxed, beatbox and nylon string guitar-driven stand-out from his band’s fifth album, “At 15 we had to leave the States again/Dad was stationed at an RAF base they call Mildenhall,” begins the Hawaii-born, Portland, Oregon-based singer’s slap-back echo-treated vocal. He’s namechecking the military outpost in Suffolk, England that he and his family moved to in 1985. Rich in lyrical detail, effortless sounding and quietly compelling right through to its neat coda, Mildenhall is at root a vivid snapshot of Mercer’s musical awakening – or the crucial second half of it, at least (see Back Story). We learn of teenage gig-going at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, and of the Jesus And Mary Chain tape that Mercer, a homesick American kid with a flat-top haircut, was gifted by a girl at school. It’s another of the song’s verses, though, which is key: “I started messing with my dad’s guitar/Taught me some chords just to start me off/Whittling away on those rainy days/And that’s how we get to where we are now.” While Mercer’s full transit from neophyte to dab hand was blindingly obvious by the 2007 release of The Shins’ Grammy-nominated, US Number 2 album Wincing The Night Away, precisely where he is now, some five years on from its 2012 follow-up Port Of Morrow, needs explaining. From 2009, Mercer has of course been rather active with his other ongoing concern Broken Bells, an experimental indie outfit comprising himself and Brian Burton, AKA Danger Mouse. More tangentially, he recently busied himself creating Pasted, an app that enables users to create photo collages on their smartphones. It’s So Now What?, though, a ballad as pretty and subtly moving as China Crisis’s Wishful Thinking, that seems to shine light on Mercer’s domestic situation. “It’s hard to imagine/The lives we used to have/When the nights were ours alone,” sings this insomniac 46-year-old and father of three daughters. He might be one of the finest pop songwriters of his generation and a man passionately engaged with the ongoing efficacy of his relationship, but those school runs don’t do themselves. Heartworms was recorded at Aural Apothecary (lovely the way that alliteration signals music as meds) studios in Portland, from June 2015 to June 2016. With Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer on drums and fellow Oregon-based songwriter/producer Richard Swift (Damien Jurado, Foxygen) handling keyboards alongside Crystal Skulls’ Yuuki Matthews, Mercer brought most of the band that toured Port Of Morrow with him into the studio. It was, however, the week when Mark Watrous (The Raconteurs; Brendan Benson) came up from Nashville to bed-in the string arrangement he’d written and recorded for conspicuously-epic closer The Fear, Mercer says, that marked a turning point in the album’s gestation: “We were all stoked and full of good ideas after that.” Quite so. Trim and admirably inventive, Heartworms rarely loses sight of perfect pop ideals. Mercer’s striking, sometimes lightly codified lyrics and appetite for melody prove extremely satisfying, and beneath the surface there’s more pleasing intricacy than in a horologist’s workshop. Cherry Hearts, with its ricocheting, ’80s-synth intro and shades of both Erasure and The Cure, is a tale of unrequited love made worse by a moment of drunken intimacy, while Half A Million is near perfect razor-edged pop. Thrillingly, the latter song’s high-energy guitars and hooky keyboards slog it out in a manner broadly reminiscent of The Cars circa Just What I Needed. Whether autobiographical or otherwise, there are a lot of relationship songs on Heartworms. With its shades of early ’60s Beatles, the title track is pretty and forlorn, Mercer sketching the power differentials that complicate many a romance when he sings: “There are those who own the mines and those who crawl.” Rubber Ballz, by contrast, is dryly comic, its protagonist and his testicles eternally bouncing back to a purely physical relationship he knows he should end (“So much for Simon’s 50 ways”). The song’s intro, evocative of a lone Swingle Singer at the wrong session, is wonderfully odd, then we drop to another fabulous Beatlesesque verse (did something rub off when The Shins covered The Word for Netflix’s Fabs-themed kids show Beat Bugs last year?). Initially, at least, the abundance of ear-worms – brisk, bright opener Name For You has the kind of hook quotient you might expect from 10cc or Abba – makes the album’s two less brazenly flirtatious tracks sound a little out of step. The surrealist psychedelia of Painting A Hole and aforementioned closer The Fear do win you over in time, though, even if the latter, a slice of widescreen Americana about the anxieties that can stop us enjoying our lives, takes time to get airborne. It’s been a while, all the same, since this writer heard a pop-rock record so sure-footed and ingenious. Dead Alive, a giveaway single last Halloween, ties its Zombie-glam stomp to walking bass, disembodied voices and another ace vocal melody, while Fantasy Island exemplifies a knack for perfect first verses: “Long in tooth/Olives and vermouth/I dine like an ageing pilot/Where are they now/The money and the crowd/Must I really come back down?” Those five-year gaps between the last three Shins albums may not have been planned, but with Heartworms James Mercer has produced another fine crop of pop. Sometimes it pays to let the field lie fallow for a bit.
“TRIM AND ADMIRABLY INVENTIVE, HEARTWORMS RARELY LOSES SIGHT OF PERFECT POP IDEALS."