Sloan - "Right Or Wrong" (mp3)
The new Sloan album, Never Hear The End Of It (or rather, it was released in Canada last year, but just a few weeks ago in the U.S., so I'm considering it a 2007 album), is pretty interesting in that it goes to challenging extremes while staying well within the trad rock boundaries of all their previous records. Cramming 30 songs into an album of course isn't such a feat in and of itself, especially when all four members of the band write songs, but it's still something of a statement for a band that's usually stuck to the standard 12 song set in the past. Half of the songs are under 2 and a half minutes, but for the most part they don't sound like underwritten suites or vignettes, although the comparison to Abbey Road has been hard for many critics to resist, given Sloan's love of all things Beatlesque as it is. It's kind of remarkable that the songs flow as well (and sometimes better) in shuffle as in the proper sequence, although it's probably up for debate whether that should be considered a credit to or a strike against the album.
Although One Chord To Another might end up being one of my favorite rock albums of the 90's (I can still remember my brother buying the album after seeing them on 120 Minutes, and then a few months later I went to Toronto for a school trip and got to see their videos on daytime TV), I've never investigated a whole lot of the rest of their back catalog, to the point that buying the A Sides Win comp a couple years ago held a good amount of discovery for me. As a casual fan, I've always had trouble distinguishing between all of the singers in Sloan (same thing happened with the Posies for a number of years, well after I'd become a pretty huge fan of theirs, it took seeing them live and hearing their solo records to really tell Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow's voices apart). I'd love to see a website that lists all of who sings what to make it easier to tell the difference. I might have to start digging through the old albums more in light of Never Hear The End Of It, which is a pretty inspiring attempt at something exciting from a band that's been thought to be past their peak for a while now. I mean, once a band gets past the hump of that first best-of, I'm sure it starts to become a question of whether things have run their course or they're going to stay together and keep making albums for as long as they're able, and 8 albums in, it seems like they've got the tenacity for the latter path.
The new Sloan album, Never Hear The End Of It (or rather, it was released in Canada last year, but just a few weeks ago in the U.S., so I'm considering it a 2007 album), is pretty interesting in that it goes to challenging extremes while staying well within the trad rock boundaries of all their previous records. Cramming 30 songs into an album of course isn't such a feat in and of itself, especially when all four members of the band write songs, but it's still something of a statement for a band that's usually stuck to the standard 12 song set in the past. Half of the songs are under 2 and a half minutes, but for the most part they don't sound like underwritten suites or vignettes, although the comparison to Abbey Road has been hard for many critics to resist, given Sloan's love of all things Beatlesque as it is. It's kind of remarkable that the songs flow as well (and sometimes better) in shuffle as in the proper sequence, although it's probably up for debate whether that should be considered a credit to or a strike against the album.
Although One Chord To Another might end up being one of my favorite rock albums of the 90's (I can still remember my brother buying the album after seeing them on 120 Minutes, and then a few months later I went to Toronto for a school trip and got to see their videos on daytime TV), I've never investigated a whole lot of the rest of their back catalog, to the point that buying the A Sides Win comp a couple years ago held a good amount of discovery for me. As a casual fan, I've always had trouble distinguishing between all of the singers in Sloan (same thing happened with the Posies for a number of years, well after I'd become a pretty huge fan of theirs, it took seeing them live and hearing their solo records to really tell Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow's voices apart). I'd love to see a website that lists all of who sings what to make it easier to tell the difference. I might have to start digging through the old albums more in light of Never Hear The End Of It, which is a pretty inspiring attempt at something exciting from a band that's been thought to be past their peak for a while now. I mean, once a band gets past the hump of that first best-of, I'm sure it starts to become a question of whether things have run their course or they're going to stay together and keep making albums for as long as they're able, and 8 albums in, it seems like they've got the tenacity for the latter path.
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on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 11:36 PM.
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