POPSCREEN: The Shins

The Shins have a curious music video history. Early favorite “New Slang” featured a series of shots of the band standing around lakes and amusement parks. But then The Shins moved on to a number of serious, high-concept tropes, including Communist penguins (“So Says I”), sad origami cows (“Pink Bullets”), and most recently, a grade-school play in which children perform gory historical scenes (“Phantom Limb”).

The Shins must have figured they couldn’t make things any more bizarre, because with the video for their new single “Australia,” they’ve returned to the mundane. Director Matt McCormick casts the band as orange-jumpsuited hoodlums who hatch a plot of petty theft. Lead singer, songwriter, and tactician James Mercer directs the bandits as they distract car salesmen and steal the balloons attached to every car on the lot. The tune itself isn’t earth-shatteringly original, but it’s the sort of bouncy song that makes you want to be five years old again, dancing around in the living room with your dad.

The lyrics don’t match the bubbly melody. They have nothing to do with Australia—they’re all about frustration with a dead-end life. McCormick apparently couldn’t resist the juxtaposition of Mercer’s lines “Been alone since you were 21 / You haven’t laughed since January” with a shot of keyboardist Marty Crandall in a pine tree costume diving into a moving van filled with stolen balloons.

The band takes their contraband to an idyllic field where they release the orange balloons that match their jumpsuits—shallowly symbolic, but forgivable. The imprisoned balloons are gleefully liberated into the air just as Mercer sings “Give me your hand / And let’s jump out the window.”

It’s hard to say if The Shins are trying to make a point with all of these contradictions, but who cares? The video provides enough standard indie bliss to divert our attention from the song’s murky subject matter.