In-store: Sloan

Sloan

Sonic Boom Records. Saturday, May 14, 2011.

I had never seen Sloan play before. Which is a statement at odds with how much they once meant to me — through the mid/late 90's and their first three albums they were hands-down one of my favourite bands. But back in those days I lived far away from the centre of action and certainly didn't go to many shows.¹ And by the time I lived in Toronto, the band had shifted a bit just as my tastes had, and from Navy Blues and on for quite a spell I wasn't paying such close attention to them. They were always sorta there in the background, but I never went out of my way. But with the band playing a special show at Sonic Boom to celebrate the release of The Double Cross and generally making a big point to celebrate twenty years of being a band, I belatedly took the plunge.

You could tell right away that the basement was set up for a bigger-than-usual event than the usual in-store. The area along the wall o' cassettes was closed off to accommodate a big rack of guitars and the speakers were set up to be able to reach the back of the room. Even with a half-hour to go, the space up front was filled up and there was a buzz of anticipation in the crowd.

This would turn out to be more of a mini-concert than quick in-store performance, but unlike their previous trip to Sonic Boom (when the band played a retrospective all b-sides set) the band was pretty focused on the here-and-now of their new album, following its opening one-two punch of "Follow The Leader" and "The Answer Was You", the pair seamlessly linked by a bridging coda.² Admitting that this was the first public airing in a live setting for a lot of these, the band continued with the album's next couple songs, Patrick Pentland's ripping "Unkind"³ and "Shadow of Love".

It was only then that they threw a bit of a curveball, using the minute-long burst of "Something's Wrong" (from 2006's Never Hear The End Of It) as the lead-in to "Traces". "Green Gardens, Cold Montreal" received a full-band arrangement that was bulked up from Jay Ferguson's spare (and rather lovely) album arrangement. Despite wrangling all this new material — and working out the choreography of their frequent instrument swaps — the band were having a fun time on stage.

And with that, the band reached back into their "classic" songbook for "Coax Me", which earned a load cheer from the large contingent that would have been around in 1994: commenting on the crowd, Pentland joked, "you might have noticed a whole bunch of kids here tonight — it's because they always do a sort of 'average age' at the show, and we want to bring that down — you guys are old."

After tearing through "It's Plain To See" they left the stage, but no one was really fooled, but the band gave the crowd a couple minutes to cheer and stomp and do that "SLOOOO-OWN!" chant before coming back for one last new one ("Your Daddy Will Do", which has a pleasing classic AM sort of sound) before closing out with the One Chord To Another two-fer of "The Lines You Amend" and "The Good in Everyone".

A pretty satisfying time. As the band went through a year's worth of events celebrating their twentieth anniversary, it's been widely-noted that this is a band that we have, perhaps, taken a bit too much for granted. Of course, it gets easier to say that when they can tear off an album as satisfying as The Double Cross and make a compelling for being a vital force in the here-and-now. That was almost — nearly — enough to keep me from wandering up from the basement wondering where my youth went. Twenty christin' years! Gee.

I'd originally posted a song from this set here, but now I've added a couple more here.

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¹ Though I really wonder just what the hell I was up to in those days — I have no good excuse as to why I wasn't at this show that the band recently sprung from the vaults as an "official bootleg".

² If the band were tiny-sizing their songs as they did on fragment-suite Never Hear the End of It, that bridge might well have been a separate song.

³ Amongst Sloan aficionados, there's a lot of time spent dissecting the qualities of the songs penned and voiced by each of the four members — I'm not quite so devoted these days to delve too much into that here. And speaking of those carefully counting things, it should be noted that the band was complemented on stage by longstanding touring keyboard player Gregory Macdonald.