The Shins perform at The Warfield in San Francisco on July 12, 2022. Chloe Catajan/STAFF.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s not creepy to care about certain watermarks of the early aughts indie scene. Trading lo-fi for some-fi, drifting away from unrehearsed evocations toward well-manicured moodiness, making songs for soundtracks for movies that flatten human beings into airy archetypes, coming of age after the world goes to hell in a handbasket… the Shins gave birth to their debut album, Oh, Inverted World, in 2001. Now it’s 21 years later, and that album can finally vote for itself and its sound as still relevant and true after all this time. So the band has launched a “coming of age” tour to revisit it in its entirety and jam out with a grab-bag of hits and whims, as it did Tuesday night at the Warfield.

Although the Shins’ lineup has shifted over the years, frontman and head indie rock dude James Mercer has stuck around. Mercer originally planned the tour for 2021… but a different kind of terror took hold in the world, and you know how that goes. The band made its intentions known even with the walk-on music, setting the scene by coming onstage to “That Summer Feeling” by Jonathan Richman—the kind that’s “gonna haunt you.” The single, “New Slang” was featured on the soundtrack for the 2004 movie “Garden State,” full of melancholy narcissism and manic pixie dream girls that proliferated throughout the period. Against the scrim that was basically the album cover, the Shins played a very faithful rendition of that inverted world, front to back.

The Shins perform at The Warfield in San Francisco on July 12, 2022.

It wasn’t revelatory, and it wasn’t quite perfunctory, but something does surprise you after a year or more of no live music. The immediacy of a rock show coupled with the time warp of an album 20-plus years old can make your head spin with memories. A respectful reprise of the album, from “Caring is Creepy” through “New Slang” (with backing vocals by opening band Joseph) and all the way to “The Past Is Pending” was pleasant, pretty and a bit bloodless. But it was still evocative, cinematic if not anachronistic—a movie you might be happy to revisit if just to live happily in the past for a night. 

And the songs were played pretty perfectly by the band. I happened to catch some of the Shins’ set in May at the Just Like Heaven festival in Los Angeles; the more intimate setting of the Warfield better suits the quiet introspection of Oh, Inverted World.

Joseph performs at The Warfield in San Francisco on July 12, 2022.

After running through the album, they seemed to happily untether themselves and roam through later hits like “Turn a Square” while fitting in a random Stone Temple Pilots’ cover of “Vasoline.” They ended with the plaintive strut of “Kissing the Lipless,” letting the guitars go from full-tilt to a hush, a whisper, a bow to the past… still pending.

The opening band, Joseph, is normally a trio but on Tuesday announced themselves “one sister short” due to an untimely bout of appendicitis.

One guitar, an errant kick drum, and two vocals packing an emotional wallop were enough to satisfy. Imagine if Adele moved to Brooklyn, joined the coop, and went indie folk rock. Maybe she starts listening to early Chicks records, implores Jenny Lewis to put more emotion and anger into her sound, and declares herself not ready to make nice, and you’re getting closer to it.

What they lacked in extra bodies on the stage they made up for in emotional expansiveness. Singing disconsolate heartsick songs that sound almost honky-tonk, they’ve got great axes to grind about the politics of love.