The Shins, "It's Only Life"

In the new Shins video, Max from the The Wild Things returns to his suburban home outside of Portland to find that the wandering bands of cannibals from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are dragging James Mercer across the lawn by his feet. Or maybe they’re aliens. I think they are the same type of thing that is on the cover of the Port of Morrow album; a cover which is almost laughably stoney-baroney. The ripples in the water in a stream form a human skull if you look at it closely. (As you can do here or below.) And the hill that the mysterious creature stands on is actually a silhouette of a giant child’s head. Classic album-cover art! You can make a pile of seeds on the eyelashes! There’s probably some more stuff in there that I haven’t even seen yet and I’ve been staring at it without blinking since the album came out in March. James Mercer seems a little too old for this kind of stuff. (Me, too.) But it’s kind of great in it’s way, I guess. This video is pretty great, too. And it offers and explanation as to what might have been happening to the guy who looked like Bill Clinton in that also-great Cloud Nothings video from last year.