Music Blogs

Q: How awesome are Sloan?

A: Um, if you feel compelled to actually answer this question, acceptable replies include: very, completely, totally, utterly, massively, astoundingly, and any other hyperbolic adverb you can come up with.

After a long, hard day slaving away doing interviews, I rewarded myself with a late-afternoon party performance today by one of my favorite-est bands evah, the not-so-secretly Canadian Sloan. And lemme tell ya, this show was so good that between their dyn-o-mite powerpop stylings and Canada's convenient free health care, I'm tempted to move north of the border to the country that a Simpsons episode once lovingly dubbed "America's Hat."

You know, when I think about all the successful yet not-so-great acts that have come from the Great White North (Alanis, Celine, Nickelback), I'm infuriated by the continuing undeserved obscurity of these Nova Scotian rock gods. I swear, it's enough to have any self-respecting rock fan crying into his/her Molson.

After all, Sloan have been dependably releasing near-perfect collections of clever, kick-ass garage/psych/bubblegum for more than a decade--fantabulous albums that come across like carefully compiled mixtapes or particularly bitchen K-TEL compilations of '70s AM radio pop gems. I'm talkin' unabashedly swaggering, flying V-brandishing, drumstick-twirling, doobie-kindling Camaro-rock. Seriously, just look at the bent-backwards pose struck by Sloan's Chris Murphy in the photo above--if he's not a true rock star, then who is?

Anyhoo, when I am not lamenting the sad fact that Sloan are only popular in their native Canada, I'm usually complaining that Sloan's YepRoc Records labelmates, You Am I, are only big in their native Australia. So do you know how psyched I am that these two undersung international rock combos will be on the same bill tomorrow night? Again, that's a rhetorical question. And acceptable answers include: very, completely, totally, utterly, massively, astoundingly...