The Shins flip folk rock music on its head with ‘The Worm’s Heart’

Bryan Smith

This January The Shins released a flipped version of last year’s album “Heartworms” in a new form called “The Worm’s Heart”. The term “flipped” refers to the reversed song order contrasting the latter album, as well as alterations to tempo, key, and instrumentals for each individual track.

It is exciting to have a tandem album experience that contains such a focused effort of musical discovery and critique. In an interview with NPR James Mercer (singer and song writer for The Shins) created “Heartworms” to reflect the changes in rock music and the changes in his own interpretation of what rock music was. “The Worm’s Heart” takes that thesis of exploration and folds it further in on itself to create something new.

“The Worm’s Heart” is probably not going to be a huge hit with loyal fans of “Heartworms”, since “Heartworms” runs a much closer parallel to the Shins’ classic sound. That doesn’t mean that “The Worm’s Heart” is a bad album. On its own, it still stands as a well-produced and engaging album. But it does take great liberties with the sound traditionally associated with The Shins, which is a bit of a let down at times. It manages to improve certain underwhelming songs with the changes made through flipped versions of certain tracks, but at the cost of reducing my enjoyment of previous favorite songs. Overall this album had a scarcity of tracks that jumped out as hits.

Heartworms/Flipped – The original title track is an electric folk song, layered with reverb guitars, and contains a happy melody that makes you want to bob your head side to side. While its flipped counterpart starts off with deeper synth tones that give off a vibe similar to “The Midnight” or the “Tron” soundtrack and ties it together with heavier bass and drums with almost no guitar elements.

The Fear/Flipped – A diddy for worrying about the stupid things, and the regret that comes with that in hindsight. The original track is a lofty pop song with string elements, a ukulele melody, and a bouncy drum beat. It gives off the vibe you’d feel while sitting in your backyard in ambient afternoon temperature and watching nature in all its majesty. While the flipped version improves the song turning it into a garage jam vibe with distorted guitars and drums, which feels like something you’d listen to while slightly hammered and speeding through a tunnel at night.

I feel this accomplishment is successful to what Mercer wanted to explore with the intentional contrast between these two albums, and how changes in interpretation of music can alter one’s enjoyment of it. Upbeat songs turn into slow songs, slow songs gain an upbeat tempo, rock changes to synth pop, and so on. The album is a good time to listen to once or twice, but afterwards, you’ll most likely never listen to the whole thing again.