Let this be an epitaph for my heart.

Oh, the Shins. I've lost them. They've lost me.
This new album ("Wincing the Night Away") is almost completely devoid of soul, and half the tracks use the same cliche cookie-cutter chords and rhythms that plagued mainstream music back in 1985. Not to mince words or anything. (This is not to say that all or most 80's music was bad; just the scattering of bands that used the same three chords over and over and over, and whose sales and distribution directly correlated with the tightness of the frontwo/man's Calvin Kleins.)
I wonder if the new sound grows on you after a while of listening, as a lot of albums do, but you know, I'm not sure that I really want to give it the opportunity. Maybe I'll just pretend like this whole new-album thing never happened.
I advocate artists' developments and metamorphoses; I mean, I'm not generally one to get out-of-whack about a band whose music undergoes drastic evolutions or regressions or whatever-you-will... but the new Shins is a blood sacrifice of style for the sake of appealing to a (really sorry) mainstream market.
So, like, don't say I didn't warn you.

And now for the pettiest of petty questions: do I remove The Shins from my list of profile music interests? It's like erasing the name of a longterm ex-boyfriend from a phone-list. James, you're just not the same man I used to love.
Sigh.