The 10 bands you have to see this year

[Welsh Rich]

Interesting that The Shins are top of the list... but some interesting reading, even if most of the bands don't exactly sound that original...

 

The Shins

In short: sensitive indie-poppers poised for the breakthrough

James Mercer, singer and songwriter with the Shins is skinny, sweet and slight, as regulations require for leaders of indie bands; as gentle in appearance as a long-eyelashed lamb and as polite as a church verger. He looks like his music sounds. But over two albums, his band have carved themselves a sizable niche within US alternative music: you've probably heard them, even if you don't realise it. Perhaps you saw the movie Garden State, in which Natalie Portman played the Shins' wistful ballad New Slang to Zach Braff in a doctor's waiting room ("You've got to hear this one song," she said, handing over her headphones, "it'll change your life").

 

The pre-release buzz for their third album, Wincing the Night Away (it was leaked to the internet in October), suggests the Shins have the opportunity to cross from cult concern - their first two albums sold around half a million copies each around the world - to major band. That said, the album's closing track, A Comet Appears, suggests a bleak outlook: "Let's carve my ageing face off/Fetch us a knife/Start with my eyes, down so the lines/Form a grimacing smile." The song ends with this cheering thought: "There is a numbness in your heart, and it's growing."

"That makes us sound emo," Mercer laughs when the lyric is read back to him. "Well, we were called emo, you know, when the term was used to describe Fugazi, and in a way, it made sense. They played emotive punk; we played emotional songs. Emotionally tough stuff. But then, suddenly, I was hearing this emo, candy-ass bullshit." He smiles and shakes his head. "But I guess the last three years of my life have been very emo."

 

Three years ago, Mercer says, "I'd just bought my first house, the dream of my life. I found out one night at two in the morning that next door was a crack house. So much hope ... So much hope was there, and suddenly that was gone." He'd also come to the end of a destructive personal relationship and was falling out with friends who'd helped the band out financially before the cult success of Oh! Inverted World in 2001 and Chutes Too Narrow in 2003. "I was all, 'Hey, I need help. My neighbours, these gangsters, are threatening me.' Late at night, when you can't fucking sleep, obsessing about these negative things, you go places you never would go." He shudders. "So there was a lot to write about."

 

Songwriting to Mercer is therapy, pure and simple, then? "It's catharsis. You get this chaos and cut it to bits and suture it together and then go, 'Yes, done.' I wanted to get rid of this bitterness, resentment, this darkness. I wanted to fucking expel something." Suddenly, Mercer is interrupted by a power ballad coming through the speakers in the west London hotel where we meet; a silky-knickers kind of baritone bellowing a lovelorn "Woaahhhh!" Mercer crumbles into laughter and addresses the bar. "Jesus, hear me here, man! I'm trying to turn this shit into something polished." He shakes his head. "This happens all the time. It's impossible for me to appear ever manly or," he laughs, "masculine when I'm trying to get my point across, without something embarrassing happening." His raises his eyebrows. "I live a very Woody Allen kind of existence."

 

It's useful to think of Mercer of the Woody Allen of indie: literate, self-deprecating, witty. And, he says, he prizes intelligence in songwriting more than anything else. "The most enjoyable part of this all is the craft. The trying to be clever - the 'math' of pop music." English pop music has always driven him, making him care for cleverness and catchiness in equal amounts. He fell in love with the Beatles as a child, "the really sentimental, soft-hearted stuff like Yesterday", then landed in the middle of British indie's golden age when his air force father moved the Mercers to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk in 1985. "1985 to 1989 - 15 to 19 years old. What luck, man. The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure." He didn't find those bands depressing; they were, to him, uplifting. "It was like: wow, I feel right at home here with this music. It's so powerful. It made me feel like I was connecting with somebody, this person singing, turning your shitty life into something beautiful. It's such fucking validation."

 

When he got back home, "here I was with my curtain haircut, into the Stone Roses" and his friends were head-banging to Poison and M