by Alan Cross
[Picking a favourite Sloan album is tough, but the safest thing to do is default to the Navy Blues album from 1998. If that sounds like you, the band has just issued a new deluxe edition vinyl box set. Here’s the word from Jay. – AC]
Navy Blues is finally turning 21! Since a debutante ball is a bit expensive, what better way to celebrate this LP’s formal coming of age than with a marginally less expensive deluxe vinyl box set!
In 1998, we were coming off the heels of our most successful record, One Chord To Another. This 4th LP was the first record where there were real expectations, both commercially and critically. First single “Money City Maniacs” did (and continues to do) well at radio (and, currently, at Raptors games) here in Canada. While the record was, at the time, generally considered a nod to a more 70’s-rock infused sound, in hindsight it’s feels like a pretty varied collection from 4 songwriters.
Perhaps the extra content from the era added here even expands on that notion.
As with our previous Twice Removed and One Chord To Another box sets, there will be three LPs contained within. First up is Navy Blues in all it’s glory remastered from the original mixes, followed by a second LP of home demo recordings for each track on Navy Blues…some with early different arrangements and alternate lyrics.
The third LP is a 14 song collection of outtakes from both the formal studio sessions at Chemical Sound where the album was recorded and a handful of demo recordings. Some of these songs wound up being re-recorded in different forms further down the road in our career (some lounging around for 20 years!) and some never went any further than here.
The Outtakes LP almost makes for an alternate upside-down-world 1998 album that never was. As well as the three LPs, there’s not one, but two 7” singles included this time. The first single contains two more demo recordings leading up to Navy Blues…an early rocking incarnation of Chris’ “Summer’s My Season” titled “Rock Star Admit It” paired with a home demo of Patrick’s “Out To Lunch”. The second 7” single is a reverse nod to the very limited white vinyl, label and sleeve “Rhodes Jam” single we released in 1997. This time it’s an all black vinyl, label and sleeve instrumental outtake called “Hammond Jam”.
That’s correct…”Hammond Jam”. That’s me trying to keep up on bass while Chris wrestles the drums and Andrew jams the Hammond. That leads us to the piece-de-resistance from the attic offices of “Murphy Design”, the beautiful 12” x 12”, 32 page, full colour book detailing the recording process, stories and experiences from the era along with song by song specifics all told in an oral history fashion.
This is all rounded out with many unseen photos, posters, artwork, ephemera, lyric sheets and many other items that have finally found justification for sitting stored in boxes over the past 21 years! Now we’d absolutely be unable to make these box sets without our friend and photographer Catherine Stockhausen’s wonderful archive of photos and once we again had more visual content than would fit in the booklet. So, we relegated a shot she snapped of us atop Reaction Studios in Toronto (where we mixed the album) to create a deluxe 18” x 24” poster contained within.
We’d like to thank all the fans who have been supportive and encouraging of both the previous box sets and tours (not to mention the continued interest in our new recordings). So please make room on that shelf, and we hope you dig this latest deluxe box. We’re looking forward to seeing you all this fall and next spring.
--taken from: A Journal of Musical Things
No comments:
Post a Comment