The Automatik

Forget Oasis. If you really want to hear the legacy of the Beatles, you should listen to Sloan. I hate to even compare them to anyone, but trust me, it’s fitting. It’s a crime that Creed and Limp Bizkit CDs have sold a gazillion copies because Sloan are the saviors of rock and roll music that we’ve all been waiting for.

I only ever knew about Sloan from seeing them briefly on MuchMusic. Their Nehru jackets and wisecracking piqued my interest, but it was a few more years before I picked up Smeared and Navy Blues (and in the used CD bin, no less.) When those two albums were in heavy rotation on my stereo, I couldn’t remember much about the way they looked except for that one guy had longish brown hair and glasses. During that time I never even saw a good picture of the band so I pictured at least one of the members as looking like this guy who worked at a friend’s office. What I’m saying is that they are so astonishingly talented it doesn’t matter what they look like (even though I’ve since gotten wise to the fact that they’ve got the “cute” thing covered). They are the clever yet sensitive boys that other boys envy and the ones who make you wish you’d get set up with them on a blind date. But on to the most important reason to love Sloan: their music.

Sloan doesn’t so much write songs as create soundtracks for your life. It’s as if they knew somehow that I would start to like them at the precise points in my existence that their lyrics would make the most profound sense to me and that their music would fill me with emotions beyond those that I can express with words (but hey, I’m trying).

Smeared is an album rich with the aroma of “potential,” and it reminds me a little of Teenage Fanclub and Sonic Youth: distortion, swirly guitars and vocals, and weird song structures. The lyrics to “Underwhelmed” are original in the vein of I’d-give-my-right-arm-to-write-something-that-clever and “Lemonzinger” proves that Sloan themselves have been overcome with passion for pop songs. I like Smeared a lot, but it is not the true gauge of Sloan’s talent.

Twice Removed (also snapped up from the used CD bin) is like the album that your boyfriend’s band put out in college. Then you broke up with him over something petty and his band became rock gods so you feel like a big idiot for ever doubting him. Or it could be that you never even dated the guy but you always had a crush on him and so the album makes you smile and weep in equal amounts. While I love the completely infectious “I Hate My Generation,” when I hear lyrics like “put me back into the same place/where you found me/before you broke me”(from “Loosens”) I sometimes think I’m going to cry my eyes out. Twice Removed is a great album with flashes of grandeur, but Navy Blues is the pi�ce de r�sistance.

Honestly, it is one of the best albums I have ever heard, ever. I can count on one hand the albums that I have instantly loved, truly, madly, and deeply, and this is one of them. In the tradition of all good albums on vinyl, it has distinct sides and the last two songs are the end credits that make you want to stay in the theater and see the movie again. I could barely listen to the second half of the album for weeks, being woozy from the post-coital glow of the first few songs. Like a heavy metal band that rocks you, then reels you in with the power ballads, Navy Blues saves its real treasures for the second act.

Now that I’m officially a Sloan fan, I have every intention of gathering any and all recordings, and in keeping with that goal, I listened to Between the Bridges for the first time today. I was thoroughly impressed. Yet, even if I don’t like it as much as Navy Blues, it doesn’t matter. There are a million bands in the world and a scant few are lucky enough to have a hit song or album. And even if they do attain that level of fame, it still doesn’t mean that they are any good. Creating a work of art is an accomplishment that many bands will never achieve. Sloan have already proved that they are worthy of all superlatives and they certainly should be able to sleep better at night knowing that they have blessed rock and roll with such a gift.