Concerts

Savor the brilliance of The Shins’ ‘Oh, Inverted World’ at Roadrunner

James Mercer will celebrate the 21st anniversary of The Shins' debut with a beginning-to-end performance of the timeless indie pop masterpiece.

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“Oh, Inverted World” is probably the 2001 release that I would most want to have a beer with this year.

After 21 years, it remains – to quote a lyric from its opening track – “a luscious mix of words and tricks.”

Having first heard 2003’s “Chutes Too Narrow,” “Oh, Inverted World” confirmed my view that The Shins were the best new band of the 2000s.

Although the former remains one of my favorites, I probably would have favored the latter had I heard it first.

The fact that very few people whom I told about The Shins had heard of them changed with the August 2004 release of the movie “Garden State.”

Knowing nothing about it upon entering the theater, I was quite pleasantly surprised when “Caring is Creepy,” the first song from “Inverted,” started playing over an early scene.

Not long thereafter, Natalie Portman’s headphone-donning character tells the one portrayed by writer/director Zach Braff, “You’ve gotta hear this one song. It will change your life, I swear.”

That song was “New Slang,” the record’s sixth track. (Placing it at #41 among the Top 100 Singles of 2000-2004, Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan wrote, “Hell, ‘New Slang’ might have been this generation’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ if ‘Garden State’ hadn’t been balls.” Sure, “Garden State” wasn’t “The Graduate,” but any of this publication’s writers most likely considered themselves too cool to publicly praise it.)

This seemed like validation to me. I liked the movie, and its soundtrack included many artists who were cool to its target audience.

And honestly, hearing The Shins had changed my life. At a time when I was deliberately trying to ween myself off of classic rock, Mercer’s masterful songcraft confirmed for me that there was stuff worth listening to that hadn’t been recorded by bands that formed before I was born.

But it wouldn’t be worth celebrating the 21st birthday of “Oh, Inverted World” by playing it in its entirety for two months if it had only two songs going for it.

“One By One All Day,” “Weird Divide,” “Know Your Onion!,” “Girl Inform Me,” “The Celibate Life,” “Girl on the Wing,” and “Your Algebra” expertly employ elements of pop, rock, folk, and psychedelia, all the while exhibiting a retro appeal and a contemporary freshness. That the album runs out of steam slightly toward the end does nothing to undermine its overall quality.

Finally, its 32-minute running time will leave Mercer another hour-and-a-half or so to bless the audience with the choicest cuts from “Chutes Too Narrow,” 2007’s “Wincing the Night Away,” 2012’s “Port of Morrow,” and 2017’s “Heartworms.”

[Worth noting: The original version of the “New Slang” video includes some cool recreations of ’80s and ’90s album covers.]