by Jeff Miers
Taking a page from the Beatles’ “White Album,” Sloan has taken the “separate but together” concept to its ultimate zenith with “Commonwealth,” an album that grants each of the Canadian band’s four members a full “album side” to use as they wish. It helps that all four musicians in the storied alt-pop outfit are excellent songwriters, singers and multi-instrumentalists. Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Andrew Scott and Patrick Pentland have long presented distinct personalities as composers, and it is the commingling of these idiosyncratic musical personae that conjures the band’s magic.
Giving each other space, respect and equal time at bat is an awfully smart way to keep a band together for 20 years, particularly when cult-level stardom is the order of the day. This has always worked for Sloan, with each member aiding in the creation of alt-pop masterpieces like “One Chord To Another,” “Navy Blues” and “Pretty Together.” Interestingly, though “Commonwealth” finds each member working in isolation from his band mates, the result is still an album that sounds hopelessly like Sloan. Hook-heavy, far from stingy with the killer guitar riffs and stuffed with the left-of-center power-pop that always has been the band’s stock in trade, it’s another high point in a career now entering its third decade.
--taken from: The Buffalo News
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