wincing

1. Oh, Inverted World
2. Chutes Too Narrow
3. Wincing the Night Away

Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

“Oh, Inverted World”

Last week, Bandcampin’ brought you indigenous Canadian baroque-pop, radically vulnerable hip-hop from Queens and majestic Danish black metal. This week … I just can’t stop spinnin’ The Shins! Why? Who knows. Someone probably mentioned them online, which prompted me to revisit their excellent first three albums. The best known of the bunch is probably the band’s 2001 debut “Oh, Inverted World,” thanks largely to the song “New Slang,” which found its way into a McDonald’s commercial and a famous scene in the film “Garden State,” wherein Natalie Portman told Zach Braff: “The Shins will change your life.” That’s probably not true, but it is accurate to call “Oh, Inverted World” a near-perfect introduction to the band’s distinctly effervescent brand of indie rock and frontman James Mercer’s seemingly endless supply of earworm melodies.

“Chutes Too Narrow”If “Oh, Inverted World” is near-perfect, then what does that make “Chutes Too Narrow,” The Shins’ even better 2003 sophomore effort? At the very least, it is a collection of all the band’s best qualities, crystallized into their purest form and packed together into 10 songs that feel taut but warm, and razor-sharp but welcoming. “Chutes” finds James Mercer’s melody-making machine humming along on the high end of his register, while lyrically, he leans on self-deprecation, frustration, uncertainty, skepticism and existential crisis. “After all these implements and texts designed by intellects,” he sings in “Saint Simon,” a highlight of the album, “so vexed to find, evidently there’s still so much that hides.” Recorded entirely in Mercer’s Portland basement, “Chutes Too Narrow” is a study in efficient pop songcraft and one of the best albums of the 21st century so far.

“Wincing the Night Away”By the time The Shins got around to releasing their third album in early 2007, they had become “indie-big,” debuting at #2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and earning a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. Almost universally, “Wincing” is considered a third wheel among The Shins’ first three full-lengths, but it’s hardly fair to compare it to the two all-timers that preceded it. Few records would clear that bar. Yes, “Wincing” has a track or two of filler, but its high points — “Australia” and “Phantom Limb” and “Turn On Me” among them — are as high as anything in the band’s catalog, while other songs stretch The Shins in new and interesting directions. Growing up is never easy for any band, but Mercer and company do so quite gracefully on “Wincing the Night Away.”