For the life of me, I can’t find this particular cover story on former Shins’ lead singer James Mercer. The profile of the current Broken Bells lead man says everything one needs to know about his former band’s inherent contradiction: underneath the poppy chords lies a disturbingly dark Mercer. In the aforementioned piece, he denied that he was a nihilist. However, he would later go on to say that he wouldn’t mind dropping out of music entirely, moving to the Cambodian jungle and becoming an opium head. Yeah, not a nihilist my ass.

So it comes as no surprise that The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World ends on such a dreary note with “The Past and Pending.” Before listening to this album for the first time, I always assumed The Shins were 2004′s quasi-pensive answer to The Beach Boys. Granted, my previous Shins experience only concerned Garden State, so I just figured all of their songs were like popping Quaalude and watching unicorns fuck. It’s eerily beautiful and a buzzkill at the same time.

However, “The Past and Pending” proved that their — or, more specifically, Mercer’s — melancholy was the crux of the music. Those melodic chords and catchy-as-hell choruses were mere masks. They were deceptive, as the lyrics’ depicting of life’s drudgery paints the best image of what The Shins stood for. “The Past and Pending” takes off with this aesthetic. The combination of lonesome guitar strums, Mercer’s depressed voice and lyrics — “Blind to the last cursed affair, pistols and countless lies/a trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running” — sends my serotonin levels spiraling downward. And the horns, jeez those horns. They fade in and out like a favorite dog’s dying howl; only to accentuate the doom Mercer seems all too aware is around the corner.

He speaks of “love dissecting somewhere along lines” or something later in the song, but his rainy day parade has already been complete. I typically avoid this track on 80-degree, sunny days (perfect for listening to their happier ode, “Know Your Onion!”). However, it usually finds its way onto my iPod playlist after failed relationships and every impending winter. Whenever gloom clouds the better portion of my day, that’s when “The Past and Pending” takes its hold.

Its inclusion, though, isn’t objectionable. Rather, it provides the necessary introspective catharsis needed whenever as Mercer sings, “enter the fog, another low road descending.” It’s tragedy and sadness for the sake of purging one’s spirit–Bill Shakespeare’s favorite go-to theme. Mercer might perpetually be seeing the glass as half empty on the majority of his songs, but there’s nothing fake about them. Were they gimmicky on The Shins’ final record? Maybe. Deceptive to the amount of horseshit we go through on a daily basis as humans? No. So it’s with a big ol’ frown that I open my arms to “The Past and Pending.” There’s no other guy with whom I’d rather share multiple shots of well whiskey at a decrepit bar than Mercer.

The Shins – “The Past and Pending”

Previously: The 30 Day Song Challenge: Day 3 – A Song That Makes You Happy