The Shins - Saint Simon

Since the album already has a song about Sir Thomas Moore, I’m going to go ahead and assume that this song is about Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, utopian thinker and the founder of French socialism. It’s funny that on an album so fraught with sexual crises, its politics are progressively sunny (to match the melodies). Although, to be sure, there’s a little melodic antipathy here. The little pre-chorus bridge sounds like a gloomy ghost story before it breaks into the day-glo chorus. A little tuneful foreboding. I remember writing a theater review of A Man For All Seasons that made reference to the George W. Bush war in Iraq and the Shins song “Kissing the Lipless.” I know that TV on the Radio gets all the credit for crushing political despair findings its supersession in triumphantly overreaching sexual congress, but there’s more than one way to express that, as the Shins show over and over.