After one listen:

A new full album collaboration between two artists has arrived (yawn!). This time it’s the front man from The Shins, James Mercer, and leading collaboration expert Danger Mouse. Throughout the 2000’s, I would get extremely excited about anything involving Danger Mouse and his control over the production boards.Yet over the last year or so, there have been so many albums with his tag on it, that I sort of lost track. Alternatively, I’ve never really been excited by anything that The Shins had anything to do with. So when I heard about this collaboration, I really didn’t put too much stock into it. Although with high accolades, I was handed the album by my co-worker. When I started the album, I recognized the first track from the radio. The song is called High Road and has a fairly catchy group sing-along hook mixed with a great beat in the background. The rest of the album really didn’t blow me away. I felt the production was very similar to that of the last Beck album, Modern Guilt, which was produced by Danger Mouse as well. Overall I found that not many of the tracks stood out from one another. Track four, The Ghost Inside, is my favorite song after my first listen of the album.

Rating:

After one week:

So I wasn’t terribly excited about listening to this album for the next week or so, but something weird happened somewhere between the second and third listen; I started to really enjoy the album. The production of the album has a late 60’s/early 70’s vibe that I never caught through my initial listen. It’s very symphonic throughout the entire song, with each song having an original sound. Some songs, like the Beautiful Citizen, use a lot of overdubs and harmonies to make it sound like a choir is backing up Mercer’s voice. There are so many intricate production techniques used on all of the songs which make it quite amazing. The highlight of their production is on track five, Sailing to Nowhere. In this song, every fourth beat goes from Hi Fi to Lo Fi, with a sample that is straight out of the 60’s. The song, like many others on the album, switches its style with ease. When the album changed to an acoustic sound, and his vocals matched the previously played violin melody, it provided me with a melody that I couldn’t get out of my head for days. Another standout track is The Ghost Inside. It rides a Gnarls Barkley style piano riff and has Mercer putting on his best Robert Plant/female soul singer impression, which he does with great success. I guarantee that you will be clapping along and singing “without waa-a-rning” in no time, after listening to this track.* The only song that I’m not fully into, is the song Mongrel Heart. It’s not that it’s a bad song, but it just reminds me of The Smiths or some other type of mid 80’s rock that I’ve grown up to hate. The album is really great as a whole and I am surprised at the amount that I’ve listened to it. I am really glad that I was given the album and didn’t just disregard it because I thought I was bored of Danger Mouse or too pretentious to like something by The Shins. **

*This is not an actual guarantee.

** I still think I’m too pretentious to like a full ‘Shins’ album.

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