Anyone that has become familiar with Sloan since they first appeared seventeen years ago can tell you that they are a rare sort of band. When the Peppermint EP and the following full-length Smeared erupted in 1992, they revived the precedent previously upheld by such classic rock bands as The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones that a band needn’t have only one chosen face or voice; while groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden had Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell respectively who wrote most of the band’s songs and – maybe outside of the odd B-side – sang them all, Sloan was possessed of four songwriting talents, four voices and four different sensibilities which did nothing but enrich the band’s sound and give it a fantastic sense of variety to each record. Of course, that sort of independent fanfare almost immediately drew the attention of record labels, but the irony was that, with so much talent in one band, labels had no idea what to do with the band because the conventional rules of marketing didn’t apply. “We were an anomaly in a sea of homogeneous bands with one main face,” laughs guitarist Andrew Scott as he reminisces now about their first big-time break with Geffen Records. “It’s so much easier that way for some marketing dickhead to latch onto one. Look at how a lot of photos of bands get done: there tends to be one big, crystal clear-face that’s huge and then two or three blurry little figures in the background.
“It was funny because they tried to get us to be one of those bands too,” continues Scott. “When we first signed to Geffen, they actually tried to get Chris to sing all the songs but we told them we wouldn’t do that because it wouldn’t be the same band. My favorite thing about our band is that you can’t really do that with us; we’re not pigeonhole-able.”
With that statement of focus (or lack of) made, Sloan continued on in the fashion they wanted and eventually made a splash with One Chord To Another and then, for a while, the going got great; Navy Blues firmed up Sloan’s place in the post-Nirvana music marketplace as a great, homegrown rock band, and the hits kept on coming as Between The Bridges earned the group still more fanfare as well as four singles in the forms of “Losing California,” “Friendship,” “Sensory Deprivation” and “Don’t You Believe A Word” – it didn’t look like there was any way to stop the little band-that-could from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Then life intervened.
The band signed to Sony BMG for the follow-up to Between The Bridges and the resulting album, Pretty Together, did get a little bit of notice, but the key words in that statement is “a little bit” and, to this day, while the songs on Sloan’s 2003 Action Pact album were solid enough, it didn’t feel finished. “Action Pact was difficult,“ concedes Scott now of the album. “We were really focussed, in a lot of ways, when we made it. We went to LA and recorded it, hired a big time producer and actually took a concerted stab at commercial success which was, of course, a failed experiment. I didn’t have any songs on it, but that wasn’t a contributing factor to its’ downfall or anything, it was just symptomatic of where I was at the time; I didn’t have anything going, we were under the gun and the other guys all had a shit-load of stuff. I had just had my first baby at that time so the furthest thing from my mind was writing rock songs; it just wasn’t possible.”
Was Sloan in trouble? Nobody in the band thought so, but when Never Hear The End Of It appeared in 2006 and did so on the band’s own imprint (it was the first time that Sloan had released an album on Murderecords in almost a decade), fans instantly began to rapturously scream, “Sloan Is Back!” and that chorus has only continued through the release of their new album, Parallel Play. “We’re not getting a lot of the ‘Sloan is back’ thing with Parallel Play as we did with Never Hear The End Of It, but we are still getting some,” explains Scott of Parallel Play’s reception. “With that album and this one, we went back to working the way it always worked best for us: we each wrote a bunch of songs on our own and then brought them to the band. As far as what ends up on the record and how many songs each of us has, it’s always different each time. Some people end up having more than other, but it’s never been a matter of ego like, ‘Oh jeez – Patrick only has four songs and I’ve got eight.’ Nobody ever whines for a flawlessly even distribution, everybody just sort of writes when they’ve got something to write and depending upon how many songs we’re going to release at any given time, there’s a sort of silent auction that goes on that determines what’s what. After that, we just did what felt right: we produced it ourselves again and we recorded at our rehearsal space – it was comfortable.”
Right from the start of Parallel Play, that comfort zone makes itself known in the rocking but sweet-as-honey opener, “Believe In Me.” On that song (and this is a theme that carries universally through the rest of the album as well), Sloan reverts to the rhythmically charged writing that long-time fans fell in love with on Smeared and One Chord To Another. Gone are the monster riffs that characterized Navy Blues and Between The Bridges and, in their place, the underground-informed modesty that the band showcased on its early albums reasserts itself in earnest.
Sloan tightens up the arrangements and jettisons the big riffs to let the writing stand on its own again with fantastic results here; songs like “All I Am Is All You’re Not,” “Burn For It,” “Witch’s Wand” and “Too Many” reclaim the off-beat playfulness, the neo-Beatles vocal harmonies and the sweetness that Sloan made hay with in its early career but, even so, it isn’t as if the band members are trying to ignore the fact that they’ve been in a band together for seventeen years. The recurring themes of age and the wisdom that comes with it as well as the writing routines that develop in a band after so many years (the refrain in “Too Many” is simply “I’m not a kid anymore”) dominate the lyrics of Parallel Play. It isn’t as if this record is a plain-faced departure by the band from all things Sloan but, with this album, they've recaptured some things that have been long missing from a Sloan album: adventure, a cute sort of impetuousness and goofy fun. They’ve realized that the competent professionalism they’d been treading water with for a lot of the material on the records they released between 1998 and 2003 wouldn’t sustain them forever. Sloan needed to take a risk. Parallel Play is that gambit and it proves itself to be a brilliant leap of faith rather than a tragic jump of stupid.
All that remains now is to make believers out of both the uninitiated and those fans that were first acquainted with the band in the late-going. “We went out to the West coast of Canada already behind the album and then down the west coast of the States already, and the response to that was really good, it’ll be nice to do the East Coast with Lenny Kravitz,” muses the guitarist of what might be in store for Sloan in the near future. “And then in November and December we’ll do our own shows around Ontario and Quebec, and maybe the East coast again as well. It’s funny because we haven’t really even played in Ontario yet and we all live here. The reason for that is that it’s just easier to do the local shows on a piecemeal basis. Because we’ve got families and limited batteries regarding how far we want to go out and for how long, the ones that we’ve done so far are the ones that take time and Ontario shows you can basically divide up into a series of weekends. Not everyone in the band likes to work that way – some would just like to do a series of dates and get the whole thing done – but everyone makes concessions for what will work for the band; that’s why I don’t think we’re going to do Europe anytime soon either. It’s expensive – we’ve done shows where people don’t even know who we are [chuckling] – and so we’d rather play it safe and stick to North America.
“After that, maybe we’ll think about doing another record,” continues Scott. “But that’s not set in stone at all. We all sort of pick at writing as we go along. It’s kind of an ongoing thing for anyone and everyone. We don’t put a lot of pressure on each other on each other as far as saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got to make another record, let’s draw out the schedule.’ Eventually we do have to work out a time line, but for the most part we all just pick at in between the other things we’ve got going on – I’m not the only one with kids and everybody has other priorities – and there is no reason to get back from a tour and immediately sort out studio time and crunch the writing. You have to give both yourself and your fans a little break between.
“I absolutely think that it is possible to release things too close together,” continues Scott. “Look at Bob Pollard for instance; he’s such a genius but, after Guided By Voices, he’d put out an album per year or, at one point, I think he did six solo albums in three years or something. How would anyone expect fans to keep up with that? You have to edit yourself; you can’t just record and release every idea that you have. We’ve never done that – we have always worked in such a way that, while individual members might not be one hundred per cent behind each track on each record, we all recognize that the albums are group efforts and that is what we all stand behind: making a record together that represents each of us.”
Artist:
Sloan home page
Sloan myspace
Download:
"Believe in Me" – [mp3]
Album:
Parallel Play is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
