More On The Shins

Following up Joyful Girl's marvelous post below, I wanted to share a bit more on these indie rock darlings. They are blowing up, you see, and here's the goods so you can say you knew the band back when they were still (relatively) small:

The band will release their studio effort "Wincing the Night Away" on January 23 in the U.S. The first single, "Phantom Limb," is all over the Internets, but we'll get come back to that in a minute. First, be sure to check out one or several of The Shins' upcoming appearances and events over the next few weeks:

January 13: The Shins are the musical guests on Saturday Night Live! SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! It's my dick, in a box!

January 18: Starting on this day, and running through Jan. 21st, you can stream Wincing the Night Away, in its entirety, on Myspace!

January 22: The Shins will be performing live at midnight at the Virgin Records in New York's Union Square. Buy a copy of the record at Virgin and you get in to see them play!

January 23: Not only does Wincing the Night Away come out on this day, but also the band will be playing on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman! DAVID LETTERMAN!

January 26: In the morning, The Shins will be playing on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic. And, in the evening, at 8:00pm, they'll be playing a free in-store at the Amoeba Records in Hollywood.

Head on over to their site for a run of February tour dates.

Back to "Phantom Limb". Check out a video segment from ABC News with Charles Gibson about the fan shot video for the single. For those not in the know, here's the skinny on what that's all about:

The only Audience Created Concert Film featuring The Shins performing “Phantom Limb” – the first single from the band’s new album. Over 200 hundred video clips from fans cell phones and digital cameras were blended together to produce Part 1 of “All Eyes On The Shins!” – The Performance Of “Phantom Limb”.

Sweeeet. You can also take a look at the commercial video for the track, now playing at music video outlets everywhere. Or if you'd rather not deal with that, you can always Hype it. In fact you can hype a whole lot more than that, but you didn't hear that from me. Seriously though folks, you're going to be one of the many who proudly own this album and then boastfully informs your friends how you were on the beat while The Shins were still indie. Of course their fans probably hope they always will be, but as The Seattle Weekly points out, that can be difficult when prepping for possibly the biggest independent record release of all time. The article is a fine read for exploring that age-old conflict about independent vs. mainstream (a topic that has also been explored on AtD).

In a last droplet of Shins news, Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats is the newest member of the band. And word from The Shins camp is that he is "Great."

What indie bands are you listening to right now?

The Mainstreaming Debate

The transition from the underground scene to a mainstream media is quite fascinating in that there are inevitably fans who will feel betrayed. There is the worry that once people outside a supposed musical elite start enjoying a band's music the band will start catering to the masses. However, mainstreaming may not be a terrible thing.

The first argument for mainstreaming is that it costs money to produce albums. While a band may make some money performing at clubs until retirement, the fact is that the band is performing to a limited audience and therefore making a limited amount of money. Limited capital runs out quickly and there are many amazing bands in the underground who are forced to take day jobs and leave the music scene entirely. At some point, we do need to start considering paying bills, having and feeding a family. If music isn't paying the bills for us and we do need to consider alternate routes, we are going to do what we can to survive. Is that selling out? No. That's a basic survival technique.

The second argument for mainstreaming is that more alternatives are being provided. Let's face facts. The state of conventional radio is declining rapidly. Rock stations have been shut down all over the country. If you are a rock fan from the New York area such as myself, you probably lamented K-Rock's move to a mostly talk station. Fans of Philly's Y100 suffered a similar fate in the last few years. We are left with Top 40 stations and the radio is being dominated by pop, pop punk, and hip-hop/rap. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the hip-hop genre; there are incredible artists - love him or hate him, you can't deny the talents of Jay Z as a performer and producer. The options are limited. Pop and pop-punk have their quality artists and followings as well. But fans of indie rock, metal, even techno are praying that they can get a Compact Disc player in their cars because there is simply nothing out there on the radio for them. The equation is simple. If we allow our bands to make it to the radio, then we can enjoy them on the radio.

I will handle the criticisms of mainstreaming in a future post. Stay tuned!