Obstructed View

The Shins / St. Lucia at Terminal 5, New York, NY, April 29th, 2012

What is it with these bands and their Sunday night shows?  Cooldads have jobs with 8:30 meetings and kids that need getting ready for school in the morning.  Mad Men, Game of Thrones:  don’t bands like The Shins get that a cooldad’s entire week is spent gearing up for these things?

I’ll have to rely on HBO On Demand to catch up on this week’s developments in the land of Westeros, because, along with two other cooldads and one honorary cooldad, I humped it into the city to see The Shins at Terminal 5 last night.

We may have lingered a little too long over burgers and beer in Jersey City before the show, because Terminal 5 is not a place at which you want to arrive late for a sold-out show.  Terminal 5 is a large, multi-leveled, general admission-only space.  It’s actually a fine place to see a show if you arrive early enough.   You can stake out a space along the railing of one of the balcony levels or even grab some nice real estate on the floor and have a nice view of the stage.  There are several bars including an outdoor space on the roof.  On this night, though, our late arrival forced us to jockey for position and to suffer through mostly obstructed views.

Acts at Terminal 5 are quite prompt.  Opener St. Lucia started at around 8:15 and played a roughly half-hour set.  The Shins are playing three nights this week at Terminal 5, each night with a different opening band – St. Lucia, Chairlift, and Real Estate.  St. Lucia were unknown to me before last night, but I enjoyed them.  My research has dug up the fact that they are primarily a solo project of multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, producer, and South African native Jean-Philip Grobler.  They were a full band on Sunday night that included three keyboards and a saxophone.  Along with the drums and guitars, this all came together to create a distinctly 80’s synth pop feel.  I kept thinking about Level 42.

Even during St. Lucia’s performance, sight lines from our location were poor unless you stood up on one of the many small ottomans available.  The sound was good.  HD monitors showing the band hung from the walls, so there was that option, I guess.

The Shins came on almost right at 9:00.  James Mercer has mentioned in interviews during the entire Port of Morrow album cycle that The Shins have always been a vehicle for him to get his compositions out to the world.  The band rose up out of getting his friends to help him.  The current incarnation of The Shins is a new one, but they did an excellent job on songs from all four Shins albums.

The band opened with “Caring Is Creepy,” the album opener from their 2001 debut Oh Inverted World.  During the roughly hour and forty-five minute set, The Shins rattled off favorites like “Mine’s Not a High Horse,” “Saint Simon,” “So Says I,” and the classic “New Slang.”  For their performance of “Phantom Limb,” Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle of Dirty Projectors joined The Shins to do backing vocals.  This was hard to tell from our spot on the balcony until Mercer introduced them.

Port of Morrow tracks like “Simple Song,” “The Rifle’s Spiral,” and “40 Mark Strasse” represent a slightly new, more 70’s AM radio sounding, direction for Mercer.  Last night, though, they fit right in with the older material.

The Shins are godfathers of the mainstream indie genre, and James Mercer is one of the best pop songwriters working today.  The band showed all of that last night by showcasing their impressive catalog of mindie classics.  The songs sounded great and the new band played well.  Though, the size of the venue and our location minimized any form of connection that I felt with the band.

For shows in the New York area, sometimes Terminal 5 will be your only choice to see your favorite bands.  If that happens to you, make sure you get there early, try to forget about the crush of humanity that will head for the exits at exactly the same time you do, and have a good time.