Sound Affects: Music reviews and ratings

--taken from: The Bellingham Herald

by Chris Conaton

"Commonwealth" is Sloan's 11th studio album, and for the first time since the abstract sketch-style cover of their 1993 debut, "Smeared", the band has created an album cover that isn't simply a variation on a photograph of the four members. Sure, their faces still appear prominently on the cover, as the four kings on playing cards, but there's a lot more to the album artwork than just the guys in the band. It's a welcome departure for Sloan, and while the music contained on the album isn't nearly as much of a departure, it does find them attempting something different this time around.

The track opens with three minutes of abstract music, featuring a dog barking, a background percussion loop, and a lot of slow piano, guitar, and bass that don't line up rhythmically with the percussion or each other. There are hints here and there of music to come later on, but mostly it's just a chore to get through. Once the song proper kicks it at the three-minute mark, things improve markedly. Scott's first pair of song ideas are catchy, going from muscular rock to wistful power ballad and back, with the power ballad leaning heavily on the wispy, high-pitched vocals of Jay Ferguson. The third section resembles some of Scott's weaker songs by featuring his aggravating speak-singing style.

It's torpedoed entirely when Scott directly quotes a handful of lines from the Sloan classic "Delivering Maybes", right down to the backing vocal harmonies, and those 15 seconds are better than the entire rest of that section of the song. From here, the track rambles through a few more ideas, including a string-backed piano ballad, a middling mid-tempo rock section, and a bouncy, horn-backed Beatles-style pop song that Scott cuts off way too early to slide into the down-tempo, four-minute conclusion. This conclusion features a lot of slow guitar soloing and a children's choir, and the lyrics finish with Scott saying, "WWLRD?" After some pondering of this question, I've decided that Lou Reed would absolutely put together a messy 18-minute track and wouldn't care what anybody thought about it.

"Commonwealth" is a welcome left turn after the excellence of "The Double Cross". It may have been folly to try to duplicate the creative success of that record with another just like it, so Sloan tried something else. The closest antecedent here is 2005's "Never Hear the End of It", which had a similarly (mild) experimental bent. There, the entire band contributed to a nonstop 30-song suite, while here each member pretty much creates their own suite. While this isn't a huge step away from what the band has always done, it's enough of one to keep it interesting for the band members and their listeners.

--taken from: The Bellingham Herald