A Week With The Shins' "Wincing The Night Away": Day 3

13 February 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Abigail Bruley

Listening to Wincing the Night Away is much like gazing up at the vastness of a starry sky — it is a wide open space filled with bright lights and colors that may be light years away, but at the same time, feel like if you reached out you could almost touch it.

What better way to to bookend that stargazing experience than witnessing a blazing comet crawl across the sky, burning a trail through the atmosphere. Such beauty is nothing to lose one’s cool over, and you may just casually mention seeing it to your friends in passing conversation, but it is something that everyone has to experience for themselves to appreciate. “A Comet Appears” is much like the two previous album closers, it does so well at wrapping the album experience up, at bringing all you’ve heard back into retrospect, but also introducing a new and exciting idea that will bring you back again.

The song travels just like a comet gathering the remnants of its journey along the way. It has chunks of the flowing groove pieces like “Red Rabbits” and “Sea Legs,” the bright and blindingly colorful crystals from “Turn on Me” and “Split Needles,” and a tail of debris trailing behind from the slow burner “Black Wave.”

That comet races toward an unknown destination as people around the world get a glimpse, if they’re lucky, and are absorbed. And when it crashes into some unassuming planet or collides with another extrasolar object, it will be over. No one may see it happen. “A Comet Appears” does end, although, it does make you want to relive the experience, to see another comet, however rare they are.

The Shins are a rare band that makes rare albums. You can’t compare them to another band, really, just as you can’t put your finger on the awe of a melting piece of ice and rock, but I’m pretty sure it will bring you back to the stars again.

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