REVIEWS:
Even though power pop as a genre is a really neat idea, the problem with most power pop bands is that though they sound really fun and catchy (which is really the point, when you get right down to it), what most of them are doing is just recycling old worn-out chord sequences and playing them really loudly with a bunch of crunchy guitars hoping that no one will notice. It's an admittedly retro genre by its very nature, and it's not hard to accuse such bands of blatant unoriginality. That's why a band like Sloan is so refreshing - they have very obvious influences and their music is clearly meant to emulate the rock giants of the '60s and '70s, but instead of just pulling old chords out of the vault and reprocessing them, they actually integrate them into a fresh sound capped off with loads of engaging and original melodies. I'm pretty sure you've heard this said about a load of routine and average pop bands, but trust me, I'm right on this one. Definitely one of the best things I've heard to come out of Canada (not that there's much competition, at least mainstream-wise....I mean, Sarah McLachlan??), that's for sure.
Sloan consists of four bandmembers, each one of which participates in both songwriting and vocal duties. Like most bands with multiple vocalists, their voices and styles kind of blend together on first listen (though not to the extent of, say, Pink Floyd - can someone please explain to me the difference between Dave Gilmour and Rick Wright's voices?), but here's a handy guide to telling them apart: Bassist Chris Murphy sings in kind of a nasal sneer and wrote the great majority of the band's material early on, guitarist Patrick Pendleton writes a good deal of the singles and has kind of a rock-ish hick voice, other guitarist Jay Ferguson tends to write the band's most melodic tunes and has kind of a light, airy voice and drummer Andrew Scott, like most drummers, has the band's deepest and most melodically-awkward voice and relegates himself to writing the band's most bizarre and experimental songs. Now that you know this vital information, your lives are officially fulfilled.
--Rich Bunnell
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Sloan unfortunately secured a recording contract during the period in the early '90s when it was necessary for every band to sound grunge-influenced and completely generic to get signed to a major label, and the music on their full-length debut definitely reflects this sad state of musical affairs. The album is filled with washes of loud guitar and straightforward and simplistic rock song structures, and the ragged and distorted production makes it kind of hard to tell the vocalists apart (not that it really matters anyway since Murphy sings on most of the tracks, being the band's chief songwriter at this point). Basically, the music on here sounds like that of your average post-Nirvana Everyband, with no quirks or idiosyncrasies of any of that crap that makes great bands great. Songs like "Marcus Said," "Two Seater" and "Lemonzinger" don't seem to have any point at all musically, and "Left Of Centre" squanders a somewhat interesting buildup (at least, it sounds like a buildup) by going absolutely nowhere at all. Who needs it?
The good news is that the album has its share of enjoyable music, mostly on the first half, which would've actually made a fine and dandy little EP were the cluttered and uneven stuff on the second half thrown into the trashcan. "I Am The Cancer" and "500 Up" are perfectly enjoyable uptempo guitar pop tunes with interesting vocal harmonies, and I really love that neat slinky offbeat percussion effect on "Median Strip," even if it sounds totally dated as of this writing. The main justification for the album's existence, though, is the insanely catchy single "Underwhelmed," an absolutely hilarious story of a nitpicky guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend because he spends more time critiquing her grammar than appreciating their relationship ("She wrote out a story about her life/I think it included something about me/I'm not sure of that but I'm sure of one thing/Her spelling's atrocious"). The song towers over pretty much everything else on the album and was rightly a Canadian hit - a good thing too, because it's the song on the album most typical of the band's later style. If "Raspberry" had somehow become a smash, then we'd have a problem.
Anyway, seeing that I just spent two-thirds of a paragraph describing a single song (HA! Now Nick can't mess with my paragraph structure without screwing up my review! TAKE THAT, JERSEY GUY!), I'll conclude by making the universal and generic gesture that this certainly isn't an offensive album like some that I could name. It's just incredibly formulative (kind of like Blur's Leisure, though this one doesn't suck out loud like that album), and another couple of albums of this stuff probably would've spelled certain doom for the band's career. What I'm saying is that the album is definitely worth owning, but if you get it after their other albums you'll probably be really underwhelmed, if that's a word. A lyrical tie-in! Now that's good review-writing!!!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
For the followup to Smeared, Sloan abandoned the whole early '90s alt-rock shtick and reinvented themselves as a highly likeable, retro and democratic pop band, much to the derision of their at-the-time record label DGC. The record execs weren't pleased that the band had abandoned the louder rock style that allegedly made them huge and basically shrugged off the band, refused to promote the album and then went back to killing puppies and drinking the blood of their young. The album caught the attention of the Canadian public anyway, which isn't hard to believe considering that it's an incredibly appealing batch of tunes with all of the catchy rock harmonies and the what-not that people tend to like. It's gone down in the record books as an unrecognized classic, even hailed by some critics as the greatest Canadian album of all time, which I find to be a bit of a stretch. Uhm, excuse me, aren't you forgetting a little record called FALLING INTO YOU???
Besides that, regardless of the fact that the album is an undeniable step up from the debut, I just can't give it an incredibly high rating. There's no doubt that the album is filled with hooky and memorable pop music, but for me the first four songs are just so good that the remainder of the album is a bit lax in comparison. Chris once again leads the pack with the jet-propelled "Penpals"(with lyrics read from fan letters and an incredibly neat guitar effect in the chorus) and the really gosh darned purty single "Coax Me"(written about how the band experience suddenly became less fun once they signed a record deal, understandable considering the end result of the Smeared sessions) while Andrew Scott makes his grand songwriting debut with the dreamy fan favorite "People Of The Sky." "I Hate My Generation" is a quasi-anthem that sounds uneasy and annoying at first (mostly due to the constant shifts between Chris' and Jay's vocals) but quickly pulls itself together into one of the album's strongest tracks with a chant of "S-E-A-N-S-A-I-D-P-L-A-Y" - no, I don't know who "Sean" is, I'm not here to dispense trivia. Sean Penn, perhaps? What the hell is he doing in a Sloan song?!?
The rest is, y'know, mostly good, but doesn't quite measure up to the standards set by the beginning of the album. The only really weak songs are the overly soft "Loosens" and "Before I Do," Andrew's painfully obvious attempt to replicate the monolithic dirge-ish style of the Beatles "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". As effortlessly catchy as "Worried Now" and "Deeper Than Beauty" are - and they are catchy, I'll give the songs that - they don't really have the melodic meat behind them necessary to catapult them into the pantheon of classics. The same goes for Jay's absolutely insane "Snowsuit Sound," which is really infectious (with the classic chorus "You're sizzleteen, and you're older than me!") but the song just moves in way too many directions at once and thus isn't as memorable as it could be. That isn't to say that the album is weak by any means, but, the first four songs excepted, the "it's good, but not that good" description applies to too much of the material here for me to brand this as Sloan's best album. So I choose to sit on the fence and give it a 7. Why do people get so pissy about the 7 grade anyway? It's not like it's a C-; it's more like a B, and since this is a high 7 it's more like a B+. I demand that this site switch to a letter grade system right now.
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COMMENTS
[email protected] (Casey Brennan)
Yeah, right on Rich! Why do people always act like a grade of '7' is not a good thing. It may not be a great album, but a '7' album doesn't always have to be looked down upon or complained about. I know I complained a bit in Give 'Em Enough Rope... but that's a low '7' folks! A '7' CAN be good all the way through with hardly any weaknesses. It's just that the 'mind-blowing' and 'breathtaking' quality that is so apparent in '9' or '10' albums' isn't there, or hardly there in '7' albums. I have plenty of consistent '7' albums' that I can easily listen to as much as higher rated albums'. Sometimes I don't want to be blown away by the music. Take The Moody Blues On The Threshold of a Dream for instance! In my opinion, a high '7' that I must have listened to even more times than the better albums' by the same band.
About that letter grade system... i know your joking, but hey, that's a neat idea anyway. As for a high '7' being worth a B+ I disagree... I'd say it should be a B... but hey that's just me :^)
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
It's hard to tell whether the fuzzy production on Sloan's third album is the result of a lack of fundage or if it was just a self-conscious decision to make a messy, garage-like album. The former would certainly be a valid explanation; Twice Removed flopped in America due to lack of promotion and the band was forced to release the followup independently - it didn't even see release in America until mid-1997 when they hooked up with a major-label distributor. Whatever the case, the album sounds fantastic - each instrument is individually given a chance to shine and the entire album has a great, open sound similar to Cheap Trick's At Budokan. The album even gets off to a Budokan-style start with a fake "live" opening and the announcement "Would you please welcome to the staaaage......SLOAN!" before the band charges out with Patrick's concise (two minutes!) and cleverly-produced studio rocker "The Good In Everyone."
Both the songwriting and the balance in songwriting has improved since Twice Removed; Chris Murphy still has a slight dominance over the band with five out of twelve songs, but the other bandmembers are slowly breaking down his monopoly with stronger and stronger material. This is especially true of Patrick, who stepped up as a hitmaker here and wrote the album's two singles, the aforementioned "The Good In Everyone" and the Chicago-styled brassy popster "Everything You've Done Wrong," which I can guarantee is one of the catchiest songs you or any other person will ever hear. "Autobiography" is yet another in a string of Chris' wordplay-ridden numbers, and his "Nothing Left To Make Me Want To Stay" has an incredibly unique arrangement that manages to twist a couple of incredibly simplistic chords into a stop-start masterpiece. Jay throws out a happy-sounding groove about suicide ("The Lines You Amend") that somehow manages to include a Ringo Starr quote, and Andrew continues to ride the weird train with the trippy and lazy piano dirge "A Side Wins."
Usually this album is regarded as Sloan's peak and the point where they established their artistic dominance over the rest of the musical world (or some crap), but as has become routine in the third paragraph of every review I write, I have some reservations. My main gripe is that the album's last few songs bring it to kind of a slow finish; "400 Metres" is alright and all, but I don't really want to hear a free-ranging rolling bluesish rocker after all of those catchy Beatles-inspired nuggets. It's kind of the same problem that Twice Removed had, but not nearly to the same extent. Also, I know that I praised the production earlier, and indeed it really makes more ragged and straightforward rockers like "G Turns To D" achieve a new, unattained level of kickassness, but it kind of hinders the more shiny tunes like "Everything You've Done Wrong" and "Junior Panthers" (great as they are - hell, I praised the first one in the previous paragraph!). Still, it's a great album, and yet another step forward in the evolution of these Halifax boys, assuming you believe in evolution. If you don't, what's your friggin' problem?
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
A lot of people see the followup to One Chord as a shallow disappointment and a confirmation that Sloan are nothing but studio wizards meticulous in their craft yet soulless at heart, but I'm seriously going to have to disagree with this accusation. The album's gimmick is that it's meant as an emulation of various rock styles from the '70s, and in that respect it succeeds admirably. "She Says What She Means" in particular has a chunka-chunka chugging guitar line that sounds exactly like what some arena rock band would've come up with, while both "Iggy & Angus" and "Money City Maniacs" sound exactly like Thin Lizzy and Deep Purple, respectively. (Okay, so I've only heard "The Boys Are Back In Town" and "Smoke On The Water." But they sure sound like those songs!!) The thing is, every one of these songs is able to cast off their really obvious influences and stand up on their own thanks to their stunningly perfect singalongable melodies, the kind of stuff you'd be able to shout along to with the top down, assuming you have a convertible. If you don't, buy one, you can't play this album in any other vehicle. Convertible.....$30,000. Playing Navy Blues in a convertible.....priceless.
The multistylistic variety of the album results in a diversity before never seen on a Sloan album, a diversity also contributed to by the fact that the album is their first completely democratic one, as opposed to the Chris Murphy "I Won First Place In A Val Kilmer Lookalike Contest" Show. Chris gets four songs, but so does Patrick, and at this point it's almost impossible to single one member out as "the talented one" because they've all pretty much risen to the level of equals. Each bandmember seems to be mining his own '70s rock path - Chris keeps himself occupied with bouncier numbers like the incredibly catchy "Keep On Thinkin'" and the uptempo, piano-based "Chester The Molester" (a lot less offensive than the title may make it seem, it's actually really fun), Patrick sticks to cock rock like the aforementioned "Iggy" and "Money City" (along with blatantly lifting a line from Van Halen's "Jump" in the strummy "Stand By Me, Yeah") Jay as usual pumps out lighter wussy but marvelous numbers like the pristine, cello-laced "I Wanna Thank You" and Andrew (a.k.a. "I Look And Sound Like I Should Be A Member Of Pavement") sticks to overdrawn, bizarre epics like the multi-layered "Sinking Ships." ONE sentence, TWO-THIRDS of a paragraph! Now that's terrible writing!
Not everything on the album works - "Seems So Heavy" is almost unbearably ugly, an example of what can happen if Andrew's epics aren't backed up by any solid melodies, and "Suppose They Close The Door" tries to employ the tried-and-true dirgey verses/peppy chorus formula, but the transition between the two always seems forced and awkward, like a computer programmed the song or something. This doesn't really matter though because they're mere exceptions on an otherwise phenomenal album - maybe one that seems a bit fractured and disjointed thanks to its rampant stylistic variety, but when it results in songs as full-sounding and great and catchy as this, who cares? Not I!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I guess after a band has made its big arena-rock tribute album, it's probably the best time to think about tossing a live album into the public sector, so that's what Sloan decided to do. Recorded, as the title suggests, over the course of a four-night stay at Toronto's Palais Royale, this double-disc live collection admittedly follows the annoying habit of splicing together the best performances from several different shows instead of portraying a single night's stay in a single venue. To Sloan's credit, though, they didn't succumb to the temptation to record any overdubs in the studio, so I guess some credit has to be thrown their way. As for the material on the album itself, I don't really know what to say since reviewing live collections isn't exactly my forte, but I can say that most of the performances are very faithful to the originals (Sloan haven't exactly built up a reputation as the next Grateful Dead, thank god, though heaven knows I've always thought that "I Hate My Generation" would sound much better with a half-hour guitar solo) and the song selection is fantastic, obviously drawing mostly from Navy Blues, seeing that they were promoting it and all and hey, no problem with me.
The differences between the songs and their respective studio versions are usually few, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any, for better or for worse. On the irritating side, Chris Murphy keeps on annoyingly letting the crowd sing large portions of his songs, which is funny enough the first time but borders on grating and unfunny when he ruins "Deeper Than Beauty" by letting the audience unintelligibly sing the entire song. On the other hand, the band's already more live-ish material like "Anyone Who's Anyone" and "Suppose They Close The Door" sounds renewed and full of some sort of newfound energy (the verse-chorus transition on the latter is handled much more well than it was in the messily-performed studio version), and "Before I Do" is magically transformed from the annoying big-guitar epic it was on Twice Removed into a semi-catchy rocker (having Chris unexpectedly sing it instead of Andrew helps out matters a lot). Plus, Andrew's songs, when he actually musters the energy to get up from the sticks to sing a two-or-three song set (with Chris substituting on drums), all sound particularly full of life in a live setting, with "Seems So Heavy" particularly benefitting from being performed in a live setting and "People Of The Sky" proving its status as an all-time Sloan classic from the fact that the crowd goes absolutely wild from recognition within the first second-and-a-half of the first line.
And that's Sloan's live album, whee. It's not a necessary addition to any fan's collection like say a Leeds or a Budokan, but it's pretty entertaining and the songs are almost uniformly fantastic, it being Sloan and all. I wish they'd resisted the urge to include a Bic-lighting power ballad like "Bells On," but not everything can conform specifically to my wishes so I guess I'll forgive them. This time.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I don't know how or why Sloan followed up Navy Blues so quickly in this competitive musical world, where two years seems to be the minimum amount of time allowed between albums, but since they ended up releasing what could be their strongest album yet, I'm not exactly bugged. What's great about a band with four talented full-time songwriters is that to make a great album that's still of a reasonable 45-minute length, each bandmember just has to write three great songs. It can't be that hard to write three great songs. It's hard to write thirty great songs, which is why Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is such an inconsistent pile of messy bald guy whining, but divide that by ten and you've got a manageable little number.
Apparently Sloan realized this little tidbit of information, and more power to them, because this is really fantastic stuff. What helps is that the album is based on a loosely-autobiographical concept about a band that tries to take America by storm but fails, and since it's a concept album most of the songs run into one another, giving the album a smooth flow that prior Sloan albums did not have. As great as Navy Blues was, the constant stylistic shifting gave the unpleasant feeling of being in the back seat during a long car trip after you've just had a really large and fantastic dinner and you're sitting there chowing down on some of the greasy and succulent leftovers - I mean, yeah, it's great, it's fantastic, but you're gonna throw up eventually.
Anyway, conceptuality aside, this is easily the best set of melodies I've heard these dudes churn out as of yet. True, there are some teensy problems - it's a bit lighter and more fluffy than the stuff on the last two albums, and Andrew's arena-rock pastiche "Sensory Deprivation" drags itself out too long into a tuneless guitar frenzy that's more tiring than funny. Everything else about the album is stunningly perfect, though. Patrick continues his newly-assumed hitmaker role with the crunching riff-rock of "Friendship" and "Losing California," and our good ol' journeyman friend Chris churns out the almost illegally catchy "All By Ourselves"(with a great pop vocal hook) and the fuzzy Television semi-tribute "The Marquee And The Moon"(which isn't about Television at all, but the title is an obvious tribute).
Jay writes his most melodic and retro ditties yet with "Don't You Believe A Word" and "Waiting For Slow Songs," but he also manages to counteract their wussy wonderful sweetness with the direct and upfront guitar rocker "Take Good Care Of The Poor Boy." Finally, Andrew is given the task of opening and closing the album with the dreary and layered "The N.S." and the funky "Delivering Maybes," which proves once and for all that Andrew Scott is truly the Godfather of Soul, assuming that James Brown and about a thousand other funk legends have suddenly died during the writing of this review.
So, in conclusion, it's great. I'd give it a 10 were it not for the aforementioned minor gripes and the nagging thought that these guys have a real across-the-board masterpiece up their sleeves that they just haven't delivered yet, just like REO Speedwagon. Still, it's a twelve-song package filled with yummy guitar pop goodness, and definitely worth your eight bucks on eBay, even though the critics up in Canada seemed kind of disappointed with it. Ah, screw them, they're probably drunk from swigging too much maple syrup anyway, bunch of hockey-loving Dudley Do-Right Mounties. (To any vehemently-nationalistic Canadians who might be out there: that was a joke.)
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I was wearing my official Sloanite badge and complementary T-shirt by the time of this album's release, absolutely bowled over by the astounding quality of their last three albums. Unfortunately, this just made the disappointment that hit me upon first listening to it all the more jarring and disturbing. One of the things that had struck me as so great about Sloan was that their hooks and melodies always went down so quickly and easily while still being of considerably high quality-- I found Between The Bridge particularly appealing on first listen, and it only got better from that point onwards. The melodies on this one just struck me as generic and awkward, with the four formerly-distinctive personalities of the Sloansters filtered through some sort of Rock-Song-O-Matic, just pop in some chords and lyrics and it'll be out and poppin' fresh in five minutes.
As the last song faded out on my headphones while I was walking into my boring 3:30 PM philosophy lecture, I remember feeling almost let down in a way, almost like the band was making fun of me for joining the party so late by becoming totally generic.This is where repeated listenings play their wonderful little part, however -- I gave the album several more chances, and I eventually came to the conclusion that Pretty Together may not be as all-over-the-place or giddily fun as the band's previous two studio albums, but it's a perfectly-accomplished work and another fine addition to their already-wonderful track record. What's offputting, I think, is that it's easily the most slick and professional album they've recorded thus far. While Navy Blues was burdened by too many careless edits and Bridges had wonderful popcraft but production values that were a bit annoyingly thin, the music on here is sequenced with total care and perfection and the production is easily the most full and breathing found on a Sloan album thus far.
To top it all off, during the songwriting process Jay and Chris were both going through breakups of the type that tend to plague most bands, just never two members at a time. Thus, their usually-cheery work takes a turn for the melancholy this time around, signified the most by Chris' "The Other Man" and "The Life Of A Working Girl" and Jay's lush "Dreaming Of You" and the breathy, minimalistic ballad "Are You Giving Me Back My Love?" It's to each member's credit that these are all great songs, though; "The Other Man" in particular would make a really fine single--dig those harmonies!
Patrick and Andrew fire off contributions more typical of their respective styles -- Pat's upbeat single "If It Feels Good, Do It" continues his "one crowd-pleasing arena-rocker per album" tradition, but this one could just be the best of the lot thanks to amazing wall-of-sound harmonies between him and Chris, and he does himself proud on the thumping, almost Weezer-ish "It's In Your Eyes." Andrew's songs follow his already-well-established "messy" style, but with better hooks than almost anything he's written before -- "In The Movies" spirals around a very Who-like shimmering riff and doesn't even have a chorus as opposed to a wonderful, randomly-transposed hook, and "The Great Wall" mixes crunchy stop-start verses with a richly-harmonized chorus with the results being phenomenally-catchy.
Additionally, in spite of his rather depressed state of mind, Chris writes one of the album's peppier tunes, the distorted, pro-rock-n-roll chant "Pick It Up And Dial It," which admittedly sounds really forced on first listen, but it's a real grower and probably kicks some real tail live.I'm still not as totally floored by this album as I am by their last couple, but the pangs of disappointment have fortunately almost completely left me by this point -- most of the songs are well up to the traditional Sloan standard, with only a couple of lesser tunes clogging up the mix in the irritatingly-"rocking" "Never Seeing The Ground For The Sky" (which, along with the last album's "Sensory Deprivation," serves as almost all-conclusive proof that Sloan should stick to songs under four-and-a-half minutes) and Patrick's closer "Your Dreams Have Come True," which has a nice shimmering atmosphere but just kind of sits around on its ass and flows along with the rhythm instead of providing the listener with an actual hook. Otherwise, it's real good stuff. Now if only they'd play live around here, though they did dedicate an entire song on Between The Bridges to their lack of success in California, so the prospects are grim.
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