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The Shins
By the time the Shins took the AT&T Stage at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, the park was really, really crowded —- so crowded that the AT&T audience reached almost to the Heineken Stage. Forget trying to negotiate your way through with anything resembling speed. Which is why I caught only part of the Albuquerque-originated band’s set.
Not that I missed much. The sound seemed unusually muddy, and their chimey alterna-pop seemed unusually uninspiring. They’ve done better in the past, including a Stubb’s show a year or two ago. But they did command some attention with a new song that they invited everyone to shoot on cameras and cell phones and upload onto their Web site so they could turn the footage into a video. So you may see a reporter’s notes —- and a shot taken through binoculars —- in an upcoming Shins video. Clever.
To be fair, there was plenty of sweet melody emanating from the stage, including songs with titles like “Kissing the Lipless” and “So Says I.” Maybe it was the heat — they were wearing mostly long-sleeved black shirts —- or the knowledge that they were playing on a stage bloodied earlier by Ben Kweller and about to be filled by the Raconteurs (or maybe they wanted to see the String Cheese Incident), but the Shins weren’t an ACL highlight.
Not everyone can be, however. Some bands just have to provide some steady entertainment between the bigger acts, and they certainly did that.
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