Sloan > Live show,New album release Aug. 19th

[M]

For any Sloan fans out there, they will be releasing their new album Action Pact tomorrow (Aug 19th).

I just found out a few moments ago that I got free tickets to a private show tomorrow night at Club 279 where they will be playing a gig, debuting songs from their new album. Can't wait!

Tomorrow night's show will be re-broadcast on 102.1 FM The Edge in September, but will be streamed live tomorrow night starting at 10pm on the following Ontario radio stations via internet:

FM96 > London www.fm96.com

Y108 > Hamilton www.y108.ca

101.1X-FM > Ottawa www.101xfm.ca

Sympatico.ca is also offering a "listening party" for this album where you can listen to the entire album / view the new video by clicking on the link below:

Click here to hear new album "Action Pact"

Below is a review of the new album taken from the ViK recordings site....

SLOAN – ACTION PACT

L and A. Two letters, emblematic of the city’s two different psyches: paradise found, innocence lost. It’s the city of angels, but a breeding ground for the devil’s music. It’s home to Disneyland and the porn industry, the place that spawned both The Beach Boys and Charles Manson. It was a strange karmic coincidence that Sloan found themselves recording their seventh album there: like L.A., Sloan are the sum of their own dualities. Four distinct songwriting voices — guitarists Patrick Pentland and Jay Ferguson, bassist Chris Murphy and drummer Andrew Scott — that nonetheless form a cohesive collective. Long-time Toronto scenesters who will always call Halifax home. MuchMusic and rock-radio regulars who — via their own murderecords label – maintain strong ties to their indie roots. Money-city maniacs who have a soft spot for sweet sugar tunes. Music vets who, instead of coasting on their cred, continue to challenge themselves with each record.

For 2001’s Pretty Together, the challenge was for all four members to make demos on home-computer software and then reconfigure the elements in a group setting. The results stretched the Sloan sound to unforeseen arenas, offsetting rally-rousing rockers like the MuchMusic staple “If It Feels Good Do It” with atmospheric, lyrically bald confessionals (the hit second single “The Other Man”), brass-inflected exotic pop (“Your Dreams Have Come True”), emotionally stark ballads (“Are You Giving Me Back Your Love?”) or loud, stormy psychedelia (“Never Seeing the Ground for the Sky”). As Ferguson quips, “It was hardly an album of ‘Underwhelmeds.’”

Sloan’s new album, Action Pact, is very much a Sloan record – in that it sounds nothing like its predecessor. You’ve heard Pretty Together – Action Pact is Totally Together, a record that reins in the open-ended experimentation of past albums into a tightly wound, fiercely focused, breathlessly relentless set of riff-o-ramic rock ’n’ roll wherein the band’s inner Paul Stanley and Paul McCartney come together in perfect harmony. But like all divided souls, Sloan knew they needed a good shrink to shake up and sort out their collective conscience, someone who, unlike perennial Sloan producer Brenndan McGuire, was not a close friend and could therefore offer the most blunt, honest opinions. And in doing so, they realized they’d have to sacrifice their inter-band democracy for a third-party autocracy.

“The first goal was: let’s get a producer,” says Ferguson, “basically a referee who we could give full rein to pick the songs. We’ve had so much autonomy for so long, it was almost a relief to go ‘Yeah, go ahead!’ It just made things less tense, because someone else is always deciding.”

Says Murphy, “With four of us writing, you only get three songs per record at the most. It sort of made you lazy – ‘Well, I’ve already written five, how many more do I have to write?’ This time, we wanted to take the best songs and leave the choosing up to someone else. There was almost a competition.”

After considering suggested collaborators – a list that included Ric Ocasek, Fountains of Wayne/Ivy mainman Adam Schlesinger and Primal Scream/Paul Weller producer Brendan Lynch — Sloan found their man: producer Tom Rothrock. “He’s a big AC/DC fan,” Pentland says, “but he’s also produced Badly Drawn Boy and Elliott Smith. If we have a duality about us, it’s we’re either way too pop or way too hard rock. I thought Tom could address both sides of us. He’s not afraid of loud guitars, and I always want to make a record that people will play at a party.”

And nothing says party like Rothrock’s homebase of L.A. – especially given the fact Sloan were set to record just as Toronto was hit with its worst winter in years. Armed with a slew of songs written at home over the course of 2002 — and hashed out with Rothrock at a Toronto rehearsal session last December — Sloan headed for L.A. this past February. However, for Pentland, the relocation to the coast wasn’t just a good excuse to work on suntans.

“The idea was to get out of town,” he says. “When you’re recording, you have to be happy, you have to be in a good state of mind to work hard. It was like, ‘Let’s go to where it’s sunny, let’s change our whole disposition, let’s hang out in the sun.’ You don’t go to L.A. to just make a record, because you can make a record in your basement. You go to let that environment influence the record and your mindset. And L.A. is definitely a very rock town.”

Once Sloan settled into Rothrock’s studio, it was no-bullshit, all business — Action Pact was finished in a mere seven weeks. “Pretty Together took a long time to make,” Pentland says, “and part of that was just people showing up for 20 minutes doing one little part and then leaving and then coming back two days later. Nobody was going to tell anybody what to do, because everybody was scared to tell each other what to do. We had to get somebody in like Tom, who we weren’t afraid of, but who we would respect.”

“It’s funny,” Ferguson muses. “Tom Rothrock is known for producing Elliott Smith, Richard Thompson and Badly Drawn Boy — these really ornate pop records. But when we get to his studio, he’s going on about Ratt and AC/DC — he doesn’t know anything about The Smiths! He’s a total metalhead. When we recorded in the room, he’d be in there cheerleading — he wasn’t sitting behind the desk. It was relaxing, and it felt like we were all together in the same boat, because we’re so used to writing and recording on our own.”

“We all played in our basic configuration: Patrick and Jay on guitars, Andrew on drums, me on bass,” says Murphy. “We went down there, practiced for a couple of days and we banged off the bed tracks live in three days. We all played live off the floor.” The resultant record speaks to the wham-bam-fuck-you-man approach: 12 songs in 39 minutes that are so incessant in their ass-kicking, you barely notice one important little anomaly — Action Pact is the first Sloan record without any writing or singing contributions from Andrew Scott. But fans shouldn’t fret that Scott got the shaft from Rothrock’s song selection; Scott simply had his hands full with a new baby daughter Stirling (born in March 2002), and was more preoccupied with changing diapers than writing songs (and wisely refrained from writing songs about changing diapers). “We were trying to not be as precious about our previous conception of what Sloan was all about,” Pentland observes. “It used to be about four guys equally represented, but this time, it wasn’t so much about expressing yourself as trying to put together a fun rock record.”

And besides, Scott speaks loud enough on the skins — check the first tune, “Gimme That,” which swiftly barges its way into the pantheon of classic Sloan opening salvos, and packs no less than three killer hooks into its first minute. Action Pact just keeps building momentum from there, through street-rockin’ strutters like “Backstabbin’” and “Ready for You” to the spiky post-punk love song “False Alarm” to the urgent rush of “I Was Wrong.” But, despite Pentland’s quest for the perfect party record, Action Pact concludes with two of Sloan’s most intense, dramatic performances to date: “Reach Out” rides its swirling, locomotive rhythm into an explosive Scott-powered climax, while the foreboding “Fade Away” bows out in a spectacular crescendo of ringing guitar leads and sad synth undertones that bring to mind Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” (though Pentland insists they were going for more of a Bowie/“Ashes to Ashes” vibe). “Everybody seems content to fade away,” goes the chorus — a statement of defiance in the face of a disposable culture, and a telling indicator that beneath Action Pact’s surface swagger lies a sobering emotional core.

“The funny thing is the album is upbeat in a way, but a lot of the lyrics are downer lyrics,” Ferguson says. “I thought it was a real summer record at first but then I listened to the lyrics. It’s the compendium to L.A.: upbeat, but underneath it, there’s a darkness.”

[Booche]

WICKED!

Thanks M, and you go have yourself a good time!

Are you going to ever sleep?

[gentlemonkey]

i hope one day to marry chris murphy and finally get him to 'settle down'. in canada.

[M]

uh-oh booche... yup, no sleep again that's for sure.....just found out that I have to golf with my client tomorrow morning.... home from party tonight at what time am?! ... need to get ready at 5:30am...tee off time 7am. This sounds like a disaster in the making....

will they let me drive the golf cart if i;m still drunk?! .....those holes on the putting greens are for vomiting in, right?!

[Raven_Space]

The new Sloan album is a big disappointment. I've had it for about a month and it is like a bad April Wine album or something. No songs by their drummer Andrew, too mant AC/DC type songs.

[c-towns]

I caught these guys at the stampede this summer and they broke out a lot of they're new stuff. I was not a fan of they're last album at all but the new stuff I heard is getting back to they're rocking selves.

peaceinjam.jamesd.