You can't throw a rock these days without hitting a Shins fan (for 'these days', possibly read 'post-Garden State', though they mayn't have been entirely thin on the ground even before that film...which I still haven't seen), and to be honest, that universal likedness has always discouraged me from digging into the band's discography (and, sometimes, to slur the band by calling them 'the new Coldplay', not because they're necessarily bad, but just because their appeal is so terribly...mass). Of course, that hasn't prevented me from hearing a solid 50% of Chutes Too Narrow, including the album's first four tracks - "Kissing The Lipless", "Mine's Not A High Horse", "So Says I" and "Young Pilgrims" - which are, if I'm truthful, all pretty darn good.
In the past, I've called the Shins a modern combination of Big Star and Simon and Garfunkel; having listened to the album, I'd stand by that, but would probably add Love and also ramp up the '90s indie-rock' quotient of the mix. In fact, the album is rather diverse, but for whatever reason, the impression it leaves on me is quite muted - it's all rather nice, and pretty good for what it is, and sufficiently interesting and its own thing not to offend me by being too vanilla or derivative, but somehow this just isn't the kind of stuff to change my life, at least not nowadays.
