The James Logan Courier

By Jack Bragg, Courier Editor in Chief

One of the most popular indie bands in the world, New Mexico’s The Shins, have come back with their first album since 2007’s Wincing the Night Away, as well as the first on the Shins own record label, Aural Apothecary. Port of Morrow features a great mix of new sounds, especially those that revolve around the use of electronic influences and synthesizers. The band however stays very anchored to their classic indie sound and acoustic based music.

The album was largely the brainchild of frontman James Mercer, who not only writes, sings, and plays on all the songs, but also helped to co-produce the album and give criticism on the album’s artwork. It’s Mercer’s essential return to the Shins after a brief hiatus with his side project, Broken Bells, in which he performs with producer Danger Mouse. Port of Morrow is heavily influenced by the electronic style that Broken Bells was based around.

Charles Francis Richter (April 26, 1900 - September 30, 1985), was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at California Institute of Technology. The quote "logarithmic plots are a device of the devil" is attributed to Richter.

Read an interview with Charles Richter, free from the United States Geological Service.