Uncommon ground
The Shins and the Decemberists share a home, but not much more
Colin Meloy once heard it referred to as the place “where hipsters go to retire.” It’s home to diverse bands such as Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, the Shins, the Thermals, Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, the Standard and the Meloy-led Decemberists. While Seattle, Omaha, Minneapolis, Athens and Williamsburg are more familiar past and present epicenters of the musical underground, Portland quietly fosters a vibrant indie-pop scene.
“Portland’s just youth-friendly,” says James Mercer, the Shins’ taciturn singer/songwriter. “It’s easy to come here and get a job in a cafe and then start your rock band. And they have really great public transportation.”
“Portland has a sort of calm longevity to it,” says Meloy in his grandiloquent vernacular. “You’re never living vividly in the moment, at the focus of all popular attention, but you never feel like you’re completely on the margin, either. There’s something really homey about it.”
Both Mercer and Meloy moved to Portland from relative musical nowheres — Albuquerque, N.M., and Missoula, Mont., respectively. Mercer relocated in 2001 just after his band released its debut, Oh, Inverted World, on the venerable Seattle-based Sub Pop label. Meloy arrived in Portland soon after graduating college with a degree in creative writing. Once in Portland, he put together the Decemberists, which released its first album, Castaways and Cutouts, in 2002 on the tiny Portland label Hush. While both singer/ songwriters were drawn to Portland for reasons other than the famously wet winters — the gardening is tops — the stories of the two men and their respective bands differ considerably.
There is something simple and familiar about the Shins’ brand of pop music, recalling the three Bs of pop mastery: the Beatles, the Byrds and the Beach Boys. It’s a thick soup of hooks and harmonies that obscures the fact that the man singing is clearly a self-conscious slave to his environs and his own neuroses. Mercer slips his lyrics of everyman introspection into syrupy sweet guitar/keyboard parts and oft-peppy rhythms. On “Gone for Good” off of 2003’s heralded Chutes Too Narrow, Mercer sings, “You love a sinking stone/That’ll never elope/So get used to the lonesome,” amid a plaintive melody that’s injected with winsome pedal steel that makes the sentiment much easier to swallow.
“I think when I’m first writing songs,” says Mercer, “I’m sitting with my acoustic guitar and playing it pretty quietly. I think they’re basically melancholy songs when they’re played like that. And then sort of putting the band to it and everything, I think it sort of changes it. It’s more of a rock and roll thing. And it speeds up a bit and all that.”
On the self-produced Oh, Inverted World, Mercer had control — yielding to both his inhibitions and his love for gauzy shoegaze — burying his vocals in his band’s instrumentation. What came out of it was a lo-fi masterpiece that gradually caught on during the two years between it and the follow-up release. Co-produced by Phil Ek (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse), Chutes carried Mercer’s injured lilt above the group’s melodies, making for a more immediate and accessible effect.
The Shins’ two records have sold a combined 290,000 units, a gargantuan amount in the indie community. The band’s in-store appearance at the Virgin Megastore in New York City’s Union Square last October attracted hundreds of fans, who appeared surprised by the number of kindred spirits.
“I seem to get the feeling that nobody knew there were other Shins fans out there,” says Mercer, recalling the experience.
If the Shins are a blockbuster act in the underground rock scene, file the Decemberists under “cult” — having sold less than 30,000 copies of each of its releases.
Rather than traffic in personal musings like most singer/songwriters, Colin Meloy’s songs are homespun yarns about chimney sweeps, homoerotic World War I soldiers and mothers who turn tricks to put food on the table. Often compared to former Athens-resident Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, for similar vocal timbre and a penchant for the fantastic, Meloy’s Decemberists have won fans of romance and satire as well as those trying to recapture their spilt Neutral Milk. Putting aside lazy comparisons, Meloy’s subject matter — culled from his interest in English literature — is unmatched among his contemporaries, and his band’s melodies, while not reliant on hooks, are streaming sheets for him to write his tales on.
“I’ve always liked fantastic narratives, things involving mythology and fairy tale,” says Meloy. “I think it was only recently that I really started infusing that into the songwriting. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was playing in Portland, when I first moved here, in coffee shops and clubs by myself to literally nobody. It sort of gave me an opportunity to really drop my inhibitions completely and really start exploring — creating more playful music, and using more of the exotic storylines that I’ve always been fascinated with.”
On strong word of mouth around the Pacific Northwest, Seattle-based label Kill Rock Stars reissued Castaways and Cutouts in May 2003. A few months later, the band’s new album, Her Majesty, showcased a giddier Meloy, whose characters now had more cartoonish mannerisms and sometimes weren’t even human (see “Red Right Ankle”). The album also contained within it the blissful ode “Los Angeles, I’m Yours,” and the line Meloy will probably never live down: “O ladies, pleasant and demure/Sallow cheek’d and sure/I can see your undies.” The band’s most recent project is a suite in five parts called The Tain, which abstractly retells an old Irish myth.
The 18-minute long Tain stands as much in direct contrast to any three-minute Shins song as the two bands do to one another. But, perhaps due to the affordability of Portland — Meloy and Mercer actually live within a few blocks of each other — both bands are able to sustain a living playing music.
Says Meloy: “You look at places like Williamsburg or Omaha or even Athens, Ga., and you can feel like there’s a real sort of ephemeral feel to it, in what it can offer. I don’t think Portland will ever explode. It will always continue on its path — never getting massive, but never being completely isolated.”