The Singles Jukebox

Remember 2003?

[Video][Website]
[5.91]

Jamieson Cox: There are three especially catchy elements of “Simple Song” currently lodged within my brain. The drums, courtesy of new Shin Joe Plummer, are delightfully splashy, and the ascending vocal melody that pops up now and again is sublime. But the star of the show is James Mercer’s earnest, relatable, inimitable yelp, back in a big way after a five-year absence. His first chirp induces immediate recall of a slew of Shins classics, from “Caring is Creepy” to “Young Pilgrims” to [insert your favourite]. I can’t believe it’s been eight years since Garden State and “New Slang” and Natalie Portman; “Simple Song” might not change any lives, but hearing Mercer squeak out “I know that things can really get rough, when you go it alone” in the chorus of yet another rock-solid indie-pop cut is sure to induce a couple wide grins.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: When The Shins were at their best — and it was a fine best — it was because they were able to take a very plain form of indie rock and execute it with an eye for detail. James Mercer and cohort had a knack for realizing bedroom Big Star melodies with vivid clarity and produced with crystalline perfection. It’s that sense of care that made a ditty as simple as “New Slang” so affecting, and its the absence of the same that makes “Simple Song” so inessential. The Shins by their nature walk so close to anonymity that a creative retread another band could get away with becomes, for them, crippling.
[5]

Iain Mew: So it turns out that, membership changes and half-decade waits be damned, The Shins still sound exactly like The Shins, picking up where they left off. So “Simple Song” is not that simple, crammed full to bursting with melody and is held together in the absence of much discernible meaning by James Mercer’s extraordinarily elastic voice. And yes, I still like them.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I was hoping that we had gotten rid of The Shins; this song is not simple, but its desperation to be power pop is just sad.
[3]

Alfred Soto: When last we saw Jason Mercer he’d lent pathos and abstruseness to a Danger Mouse project. Over a full-bodied mix that sounds like somebody discovered How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb last year, Mercer strains for notes in a futile attempt to accompany the electric rhythm strums which too many indie fools think signify an embrace of rock verities, and to escape lyrics about upturned boats on cliffs.
[5]

B Michael Payne: Not to fall too deeply into the music writer cliché hole, but this sounds like The Shins doing a Who song! I do not think I mind it. I’ve admittedly missed the last few go arounds with The Shins, but I’ve always felt like their main strength was making really muscular-sounding pop music that wouldn’t scare off the bespectacled and lithe of limb. “Simple Song” has that snappy-shiny James Mercer vocal effect going on in spades, and a not-unprepossessing collection of hooks and riffs. While it’s more rock-schlock than literary-lissome, I think it’s a good direction for the band. They’re notoriously tight and musical-minded, and their talents perhaps lay in making anthemic indie rock with a big heart rather than reverb-y indie with the presence to fill only life-changing headphones.
[7]

Sally O’Rourke: It’s a new decade for The Shins: not the 2010s, the 1970s. “Simple Song” finds James Mercer infusing his partly-cloudy psych pop with a bit of Who’s Next swagger, from the assertive bash of the drums to the eddying keyboards to the backing vocals that roar like a packed stadium. It’s not quite classic rock revivalism; the band’s too winsome, the melody too fragile, for that kind of brio. But the added punch helps anchor the otherwise ethereal arrangement, letting the song soar without wisping away.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Mercer jumps from an Animal Collective-type intro to scaling a ziggurat before dawn with ten guitars in his backpack in no time at all. But I’m greedy for the hooks, for men singing above their range, for all the guitar-pomp architecture you can assemble with your hired goons.
[8]

Jer Fairall: There’s enough going on here that I’m tempted to proclaim this the least bored I’ve ever been by this lot, a lush prog-rock expansiveness that the listener might easily mistake for depth. But it all winds and builds towards nothing in particular, unless a deadpan joke with the song’s title as the punchline qualifies as something, and the alleged pop genius James Mercer remains a bland non-entity as a frontman.
[5]

John Seroff: Proggy, sloggy, soggy fare with the uncomfortable and naked feel of a concept album track isolated from its narrative.  Unlikely to change anyone’s life.
[4]

Michaela Drapes: Skims just close enough to familiar territory with faint echoes of back catalog tics that I was forced to go back to listen to The Shins’ three previous albums to look for clues and evidence of progress. It’s here, surprisingly! Sleeker production, streamlined melodic and lyrical tropes — bionic Shins, perhaps. Unfortunately, this chrome sheen is about the only interesting thing going on. I’m afraid this is one of those cases where my benchmark for this band will have everything to do with the hot afternoon in 2001 when I slipped a discarded promo of Oh! Inverted World rescued from an Austin used CD store’s post-SXSW $5 bin into my junky car CD player and let a few scraggly dudes change my life for a couple of months. That time is as distant for The Shins, I think, as it is for me.
[6]