The thing that's fucked about lifting weights, a thing that keeps good people out of gyms, is that you aren't doing enough things at once. There is nothing to occupy your mind. You're just supposed to sit there and lift this mass of matter again and again and again and again and again and again and again? And then do that again? And then move to another bench and do that again, with a different thing? Could there be anything more boring? It occurred to me last night at the gym that my happiest few weeks there were the weeks in February 2007 when I was listening to the Shins' third album, Wincing the Night Away, on repeat, not cuz it's a particularly energetic album (it ain't), but cuz I'd agreed to review it for the paper, and listening to an endless loop of it and trying to figure out what there was to say about it gave me something—something other than again and again and again and again and again and again and again—to think about.

I'm notoriously slow on the uptake, new-music-wise, and the newest stuff Grandy has pointed me towards—the Pica Beats (excellent), Vivian Girls (likewise; also Everett True has a longer piece about them in the paper that goes live today)—are not on my iPod owing to some mental block I have about taking the time to synch my iPod to my computer, and so last night at the gym, unable to think of anything better to listen to, I put on Wincing the Night Away. Just to see how it's been doing.

The rest of this writes itself—it was better than I remembered! It was better than I said! In that review I argued that the single "Phantom Limb" was a "weak" and "anemic" and too much like "New Slang" to get excited about, but this winter, as opposed to last year's winter, its anemia seems welcome. In the dark, post-election, layoff-ish anxiety of this winter, "Phantom Limb" seems slow in a pleasant way, like how a diazepam drip is slow in a pleasant way. And "Sea Legs" isn't "tedious" at all, or all that "long," and the janky noise collisions at the end—all the beeps and burps and redirects, which James Mercer once told an interviewer were just leftover scraps of beats and melodies that he let play all on top of each other after he got up to take a leak in the studio or something (don't remember the anecdote exactly)—aren't annoying at all, really, and are a blast of friendly/creative/unexpected air.

The tedium I detected was probably just the tedium of again and again and again and again and again and again and again infecting the way I was listening. A couple weeks ago, an acquaintance mentioned that he'd just listened to Wincing the Night Away for the first time on a road trip. "GREAT road trip album!" he said. He went on and on about it. I thought about what kind of album it would be if you were listening to it on the highway, as stuff outside the car grew bigger and flew by you, as opposed to listening to it while lifting weights in a mirrored basement, and it seemed like an entirely different album.

As for why I gave it two stars back then—two stars!—I, uh, I don't know what to say, except that, though the first two Shins albums are better than the third, giving Wincing the Night Away two stars was (to use Megan Seling's favorite word) retarded. Then again, the whole starring system is retarded. It's a dodge. It tells you so little. To this end, it was startling in a great way to be signing off on pages yesterday and see that Grandy has designed a new scheme for rating albums, a scheme I fully support.

Wincing the Night Away is definitely a slug, though there's an argument to be made for unicorn.