INTERVIEWSWatch the Shins' Deceptively Sinister 'It's Only Life' Video

From the Shins' latest album Port of Morrow, "It's Only Life" is one of James Mercer's more heart-on-sleeve tracks, and now it has a similarly sentimental video. "I've been down the very road you're walking now / It doesn't have to be so dark and lonesome," the singer and songwriter advises, as if he's come out from the other side of the desolate "High Road" he sang about a few years ago in Danger Mouse collaboration Broken Bells. Directed by Hiro Murai, who has also overseen recent videos for Friends and St. Vincent, this lush, verdant clip at first appears to offer its own consolation, starring a Calvin-ish boy in a red cape and his Hobbes-y dog. But it turns out Mercer is being dragged off to fate unknown by a horde of huddled beasties. Fireworks end the strange, vaguely unsettling episode: It's celebration rock, Portlander sad-bastard style, (via A Heart Is a Spade).