Album Review: Sloan – “Commonwealth”

By: Daniel Gerichter (@ZenDonut) –

It’s not easy being a Canadian rock institution, but after 20 years, Sloan has earned the title with aplomb. Commonwealth – the Toronto-via-Halifax rockers’ 11^th studio album – proves what we’ve known about them all along: they’re funny, they’re eclectic and they’re a product of four streams of effort. No more and no less.

Commonwealth is a concept album. To wit, it’s a DOUBLE concept album. The concept is this: as seen on the cover art, Sloan’s members are four-of-a-kind kings in a deck of cards. The suits of these playing cards correspond to the titles of their solo sides: Jay Ferguson’s side is Diamond, Chris Murphy’s is Heart, Patrick Pentland’s is Shamrock, and Andrew Scott’s is Spade.

Here’s how the track listing works:

Diamond (Ferguson):
1. We’ve Come This Far
2. You’ve Got a Lot on Your Mind
3. Three Sisters
4. Cleopatra
5. Neither Here Nor There

Heart (Murphy):
6. Carried Away
7. So Far So Good
8. Get Out
9. Misty’s Beside Herself
10. You Don’t Need Excuses to Be Good

Shamrock (Pentland):
11. 13 (Under a Bad Sign)
12. Take It Easy
13. What’s Inspire
14. Keep Swinging (Downtown)

Spade (Scott):
15. Forty-Eight Portraits

Got it? Good. Ferguson, notable for his vocals on “I Hate My Generation” and “The Lines You Amend”, takes Sloan more towards his own influences (psychedelic-era Beatles and Supertramp). This is especially notable on songs like “You’ve Got a Lot on Your Mind” and “Cleopatra”, which nicely bends the upbeat Sloan style but could sound perfectly at home in the ’60s. As a bonus, there’s a nod to the band’s past on “Three Sisters”. Ferguson cleverly contrasts the now-infamous line from Twice Removed ‘It’s not the band I hate/It’s their fans” with “she recognized the tune/but not the band”.

Murphy (lead singer of tracks like “Coax Me”, “The Other Man”) takes over on side two. Murphy’s style more closely resembles an early Elvis Costello or even Steve Miller: it’s quirkier, more straight-ahead and even a bit dark at times. On tracks like “Get Out” and “You Don’t Need Excuses to be Good” (a probable single down the line), Murphy trades the organs and pianos for harder bass lines and refrains, packed in with choruses that fans will be chanting along with like “Get off on good behavior – for now!”.

Patrick Pentland, (lead singer on tracks like “The Good in Everyone”, “Money City Maniacs”) immediately shows that his biggest influences were his contemporaries: The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Thrush Hermit. Gone are the soft laments, coos and Revolver-like three-part harmonies and here to stay are fuzzy, crunchy guitars on tunes like “Take it Easy” and lead single “Keep Swinging (Downtown)”. The lyrics are Sloan at its horn-throwing best with lines like “Count the stars and count the cars/deal yourself an ace/buck the tend that you depend on/look the devil in the face”. It’s utterly ridiculous, but it’s the Sloan we love.

While Commonwealth is shamelessly self-indulgent, it behaves that way in equal measures. Everyone gets a turn – and here’s the difference – with 100% support from their bandmates.

Now, on the topic of self-indulgence comes Commonwealth’s final track, “Forty-Eight Portraits”. This is an epic, prog-to-death, nearly 18-minute long track that features every member of the band on vocals. It jumps from Ferguson’s space-rock to Murphy’s mod-like torch songs to Pentland’s fuzz bonanzas. Organs and distortion are both set to overdrive throughout – sometimes together and other times separately. There’s a children’s choir, and a moment of brilliant chaos in the song’s final minute. The band tasked Scott (“People of the Sky”), clearly the least pronounced of the bunch, to conclude the project – and so he has.

Sloan’s back catalog has survived grunge, alternative, nü metal and Nickelback. They’ve made songs that blended in with whatever FM radio fixated on at the time – sometimes a joyful pastiche to their influences, but on their own terms every time. Commonwealth sets out to prove that Sloan has always been a sum of its parts by giving each member their own moment in the sun. And while that point is salient, it’s also the cause of the album’s lack of cohesion and focus. Each side is responsible for a great bunch of songs but this being a concept album, they’re squished in with other, less-than-great tracks. Unfortunately in this case, it’s the difference between what is a fairly solid album to almost being one of the band’s best.

Essential tracks: “Three Sisters”, “Get Out”, and “Take It Easy”