Rememberances of Shins Past

It was a night at the visibly crumbling Orpheum Theatre to see The Shins with Viva Voce. I haven’t been to the Orpheum in quite a while and I’d like to assure you there have been no improvements to the place since I first went there in 1983 to see The Cure. The stained and torn chairs are hardly connected to the floor, and the balcony seems hardly connected to anything. Our seats were excellent and strange, just parallel to the stage in the far left box, a place that I feared if I jumped up and down in would fall crashing to the floor below.

Entering in the middle of Viva Voce’s set I found myself with a problem. I was trying so hard to like them, but found myself repeatedly stymied in my efforts. The most outstanding problems with Viva Voce are:

• The band’s love of overlong cock-rocking guitar solos that devolve into masturbatory noodling. Now granted, the key difference between the usual cock-rocking and this rocking is these noodles are cooked up by pretty girl guitarist Anita Robinson. So for a while I considered the idea of a woman laying down these licks as joyfully breaking the mold, but after the umpteenth guitar solo I realized that even feminism can’t justify how tedious this is.

• The attire drummer Kevin Robinson wore on stage, which included a bicentennial colored headband with his ears poking out between his greasy locks. Hey, I dressed up to come out tonight, since I’m paying money to sit in this chair, do you think you could bother to do something too?

Partway through the set I found if I positioned myself so the large stack of monitors were blocking my view of drummer Robinson I was able to enjoy Viva Voce much more, but even this couldn’t fix the band’s herky jerky songwriting structure which would start in one direction, then veer off to not only somewhere different, but somewhere I had no interest in going. I guess this is why they say you can take the hippies out on tour, but this still doesn’t make them hip. Congratulations Viva Voce, you are the first boy/girl drum/guitar combo I have ever actively disliked.

Thankfully headliner The Shins were perfectly lovely in nearly every way. The band opened by ripping through the first 4 tracks on their new album “Wincing The Night Away” and kept the fevered pitch going the rest of the night. Singer James Russell Mercer’s voice was sweet and high and the band were tight, grabbing their hooks as if to wring every bit of sunshine they could from each song.

The interesting thing about The Shins at present, is they seem caught between where they once were (indie rocking small clubs) and where they are now (debuting at #2 on Billboard), and their show hasn’t quite evolved to the new space they’re in. So there was a backdrop behind the stage, but nothing happened with it, there were lights, but nothing really happened with them either, the band put on a fine show, but one lacking the kind of frills you often see in a room of this size.

Fortunately, this didn’t seem to matter to the devoted group of thick necked guys wearing baseball hats who had come out to see the band - you know, the kind of guys who would have beat The Shins up in high school? So when they launched into a blasting cover of The Modern Lovers’ “Someone I Care About" for their encore - thinking it would surely connect with a Boston audience - instead, for the first time all night, there was no dancing or singing along, just a group of 3000 standing stock still with question marks floating over their collected heads. Oh, to be young (and thick necked, and be wearing a baseball cap).

It’ll be interesting to see where The Shins are in another year or so, if their own heads will be fitted for baseball caps as well, or if they’ll be playing for an entirely different team by then.