Anniversary Record Club, June 2016: Sloan - One Chord To Ano

Click through for full playlist.

EDIT: Checking it now and it doesn't work as a playlist. Try this. 

So Sloan is definitely one of my favourite bands, with Underwhelmed being probably my favourite song of all time (depending on the day). I haven't given a full listen through yet today, but my initial memories are the lead-off track (and first single) The Good in Everyone is their typical guitar heavy driving rock song, with a similar style to Underwhelmed, and is an unsurprisingly great song. What is surprising is that their highest charting single ever in Canada is actually Everything You've Done Wrong from this albums, which is a fun breezy pop song, with a goofy accompanying video. I didn't actually realize this was a popular song of theirs, and wonder if it was just some fluke of when they peaked, or because it has a broad appeal across multiple radio stations. Not to say that I don't like the song, but it is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Sloan's music.

Anyone hear The Stooges first record in the opening track? Like "I Wanna Be Your Dog" kinda guitar tone and crunchy chords that sound like a rearrangement of that and "No Fun".

I’ve been revisiting this one (it’s not an album I’ve listened to in its entirety in years) and I’m hoping to have more thoughts on it soon, but so far here’s what I’ve been thinking…

To me this seems to be the album where Sloan really came into their own – their debut Smeared (which I still really love) seemed to be more of a grunge-influenced early ‘90s guitar rock thing and its follow up Twice Removed while beloved by critics (and undoubtedly a lot of fans) was more of a Beatle-esque pop record which at least in my circle of friends was seen as a bit of a misstep.

When this one hit, though, with the crunchy guitar tone on first song and lead-off single “The Good in Everyone” they seemed to win back a lot of fans and then followed it up by releasing the peppy, horn-led “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and the “Proud Mary”-cribbing “The Lines You Amend”. This was also the point where the different songwriting personalities within the band started to become clear – Chris Murphy was the goofy, quirky guy, Patrick Pentland was the rock guy, Jay Ferguson was the heart-on-sleeve guy and Andrew Scott was the I-clearly-don’t-give-a-fuck guy (and I don’t mean that as an insult – I’ve always really liked his contributions).

OK, speaking as an American here and indie rock fan from about '93 onward, this album struck me as...perfectly fine. I listened to it on repeat and it's something I would have enjoyed playing in my college dorm a few years later, along with the Chapel Hill and Elephant 6 bands it seamlessly blends in with. Therein, I think, is the reason they never got big in the U.S. - so many artists were following the same jangly power pop template at the time on both sides of the Atlantic (the first that spring to mind listening to this are Matthew Sweet, Superchunk, Teenage Fanclub, a bit of Ash, the lighter side of Elliot Smith, and seriously, like, every E6 band from Beaulah to the Sunshine Fix) that they'd need some coloring outside the lines - some messiness or experimentalism - to set themselves apart. Maybe that's the case on other albums, but what I'm hearing here is just well-produced, well-played, and well-sung 90s jangle pop. I particularly like "The Good in Everyone", "Junior Panthers" (probably my favorite just for sounding different), and "Everything You've Done Wrong". Later I would develop an appreciation for highly polished indie pop, especially from Japan and Scandinavia, but at the time, I preferred the shambolic fuckery of Pavement (and I still do now). Respect to Sloan for paving the way for the Canadian indie rock explosion of the early aughts, though.

As promised, here are my hotly anticipated, half-assed thoughts on Sloan’s One Chord to Another:


1. The Good in Everyone – Toronto alt-rock trivia time: the voice at the beginning welcoming Sloan to the stage is Toronto-area DJ Martin Streak, who was best known around this time for his weekly gig hosting CFNY’s live-to-air broadcasts from the Phoenix nightclub. This always bums me out when I hear this song ever since Streak took his own life several years ago, shortly after being let go by the station. I spent a lot of Saturday nights driving my parents old, tape-deck-free Ford Taurus listening to that dude.
*cough*
Aaaaaanyway. Moving on.


2. Nothing Left to Make Me Want to Stay – Decent song, but nothing really too exciting going on here

3. Autobiography – Siding with MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin here, this is one of my faves from this record – I’ve always enjoyed the wordplay in this one, conflating “latter” with “ladder” and so forth

4. Junior Panthers – Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

5. G Turns to D – a more raucous Chris Murphy raver melding relationship woes and guitar lessons. I like to imagine this is a return of the the girl who was underwhelmed and told him to loosen up on her way to the LC

6. A Side Wins – Andrew Scott is the least prolific of the Sloan songwriters, but I’ve always loved his kinda-flat, half-assed-sounding vocals, especially on this song where it plays off a bouncy piano line that eventually morphs into some kind of Peanuts dance party thing at the end

7. Everything You've Done Wrong – As heroboy mentioned above, this is inexplicably the highest charting Sloan song (I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t “The Other Man” which was impossible to escape in 2001), but it’s a light, jaunty, horn-led blast of summer fun

8. Anyone Who's Anyone – This one always just kind of blends into the background for me. I guess the atonal, driving beat in the background is kind of neat with the harmonics but I find it more interesting in theory than practice

9. The Lines You Amend – For some reason I remember this being the biggest hit off this album in the summer of ’96, with that intro borrowing liberally from “Proud Mary”. For me, this is the sound of hanging out in my friend Kevin’s basement working on this stupid comic book project thing we were doing between our first and second years of college. I didn’t actually own this album until many years later, but it seemed to be one thing that all the punks and alt-rock dudes and classic rockers could agree upon in that blurry, boozed out summer.

10. Take the Bench – This one doesn’t really get going until the horns kick in at the end, but man… when those horns kick in at the end? Good stuff.

11. Can't Face Up – Perfectly pleasant, bouncy power pop.

12. 400 Metres – More Andrew Scott slackerism. This is probably the Pavementiest that Sloan have ever sounded.

I think moimoi hit the nail on the head - the market was just saturated with this stuff in the late 90's, and devoid of social context ("This is the song that was playing when ____!") it's fairly easy for albums of this ilk to start to sound samey. The only reason Sloan became a blip on my musical radar was because around 2007 I joined the forums for the webcomic Questionable Content, and many of the regular users were Canadian music snobs who praised Sloan as gods. One Chord to Another was the album they all pointed to to start my initiation. Listening to it now, it's not leaving as much of an impression as it did then, but again, that's probably because every time I tried to play it at a party there would be a slew of "What the fuck is this?" reactions, because all my friends in college listened to Kanye.

"Take the Bench" is probably my favorite off the album's list, channeling as much Beulah as the band possibly can (and that brass!). It's like something you would listen to while drinking crappy light beer in the back of a pickup truck in someone's backyard in summer. The latter half of the album is probably the best sequence of tracks on the thing, all fairly unique and not a dud among them (no "Junior Panthers" to kill the vibe). Weird that their big push in the States would be so backloaded with the good stuff, considering nobody this side of the 45th parallel has an attention span. 

So this was my first time hearing it in full. I liked it just fine, though wasn't as enthused by this as by their two albums on Geffen. The only song that really sticks for me is 'Everything You've Done Wrong', with its sunny horns. I definitely recall that track from the time. I belive they have another eight or so studio albums following this one which I've heard nothing from, so I may rectify that.

So, it looks like the AV Club has chosen this album as this month's permanent record. Are they cribbing our note?