--taken from: The Record
by Patrick Finch
Too many bands find their legacies in the hands of buffoons. One-sided record deals and oceans of legal mumbo-jumbo often keep bands and their catalogues at arm’s length. Luckily, for fans as much as for the band, Sloan has managed to keep a tight hold on their life’s work and ensure that quality control is paramount. Recently, after much demand, Sloan re-released their 1994 masterwork Twice Removed on vinyl. Packaged with an LP of demos, a third LP of unreleased material, and a wealth of never-before-seen photos, the handsome box set is the ultimate “deluxe edition”. To celebrate, Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Andrew Scott, and Patrick Pentland are touring, playing the record in its entirety.
“Some of us in the band had been thinking about it for a while,” singer-guitarist Jay Ferguson tells me. “I’d kind of always wanted to do one of those back-to-back album shows; a band taking an older album and playing it back to front, sort of revisiting it. Playing it for older fans or younger fans who were too young to see the shows the first time around.
“Twice Removed originally came out on vinyl in 1994 and I think we repressed it maybe in 1997 or so, and it’s been out of print since then. So we thought we’d combine those ideas and do a tour and a reissue at the same time. Chris and I have amassed so much stuff over the years for a Sloan archive — it’s basically a race between Chris and I to see who can amass the most Sloan ephemera — we kinda thought this would be a way to put all of that stuff that we’ve saved to good use. We didn’t have a new Sloan album planned for this year, so it made sense. Chris and I spent the early part of 2012 creating the box set.”
Twice Removed was a game-changer for Sloan. They were hot in Canada and critical favourites in the U.S.; their label at the time, Geffen, hoped to find another Nirvana in the young Nova Scotians. Unfortunately, the album was not the noisy, grunge opus that Geffen had hoped for and the label promptly withdrew their support. Twice Removed would go on to be named the Greatest Canadian Album of All-Time by Chart Magazine, and it forever changed how Sloan handled their business.
“We didn’t really get dropped from Geffen,” Ferguson said. “Our band kinda broke up and then we left Geffen, basically. In Canada, Twice Removed did all right, but in America it didn’t do that great. So I think what it really taught us was that it’s difficult pleasing someone else who’s paying for what you’re doing. It’s better to do what you want to do and pay for it yourself. Which is what we learned when we did (1996’s) One Chord To Another. We did it at our own pace, at our own budget, and we didn’t have to answer to anybody. And we knew we were putting it out ourselves and paying for it ourselves. If you take the reins of your own business, I don’t know if you have a better chance or a worse chance, but you have a more satisfying business model as far as I’m concerned. And I think that’s what we learned from the Geffen experience.”
Twice Removed, despite its tumultuous birth, is still as vibrant, charming, and exhilarating today as it was when their short-sighted record label deemed it ‘not grunge enough’ to deserve adequate promotion. In fact, it is just that decidedly un-90s-ness of the album that may very well ensure that it someday stands alongside the best of Big Star and The Replacements.
“I think it sounds like a record that could have been made whenever,” Ferguson agrees. “I don’t think it has a dated sound or anything like that. But I also think the songs were good and it’s nice to know that people still remember it and still hold it in some sort of esteem.”
--taken from: The Record
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