Canada Dry

If there's an accolade more dubious than One of the Best Records You've Never Heard , it's surely Best Canadian Album of All Time . But having earned such backassward acclaim for their 1994 sophomore effort Twice Removed and having lived through not-so-mutual break-ups with two record companies since Canada's Sloan are still in the game.

With their fifth studio album, 1999 s Between The Bridges, in North American stores now, a handful of songs popping up in Sophia Coppola's ethereal film The Virgin Suicides, and a bunch of European gigs supporting compatriots The Tragically Hip under their belts, Sloan are taking another crack at world domination with their patented brand of guitar-pop.
Once signed to Geffen, who didn't live up to expectation, Sloan later released two albums, 1997's relatively bare-bones Once Chord To Another and 1998's utterly rocked-out Navy Blues, through EMI subsidiary The Enclave, which subsequently folded. The band now runs their own label, Murderecords.
We ve definitely had a few false starts, says guitarist Patrick Pentland. But we know at this stage we're probably never going to be the new big thing. We're working on our sixth record. I doubt we're going to get discovered . So now it's a matter of we should be working, where can we go? .
Last year s answer was Australia and Japan; next year's might be Ireland born in Newtownards in the North, Pentland s got family in Bangor and is eager to get the band to the auld sod. Sloan got their actual start in 1991 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the harbor city whose two bridges inspired the punny Between The Bridges title. In subsequent years, they migrated one-by-one to Toronto, where they re now demoing songs for their next release.
A brilliant oddity in the rock world, the band is comprised of four songwriters, all of whom sing lead on songs of their own creation.
This onstage game of musical chairs results in a visceral and diverting live show with a tendency to blow headlining acts out of the water. And instead of creating a situation of there being too many cooks, the quadruple songwriting seems to ensure not only high quality, but generosity among band members.
I would say that the person who s writing a song is usually insecure enough that if they get the feeling that the other three don t like it then they don t want to put it on the record, Pentland explains.
The four create a surprisingly cohesive sound that blends classic influences with a wry, joke's-on-you sensibility that might be attributed to their native Halifax's unusually high concentration of both Ph.Ds and bars.
Drunken intellectuals they re not. But with lyrics about everything from the perils of teaching your girlfriend how to play guitar and the painful ritual of household piano recitals, to a penpal crush between an African girl and Norweigan boy and, oh yeah, California falling off the map, Sloan are hardly regurgitating stadium rock anthems.
So would Sloan do it again? Sign with a big bad record company?
I don t think we've ever ruled out a major label, Pentland explains. Obviously we d all love to make more money. But at this point all we can concern ourselves with is playing the areas we do well in and sort of slowly extending that circle out as we can. For a band of our age I think we re fairly successful considering the dozens of bands that were around when we started that aren't around anymore. We're not trying to be poster boys for independents, but we've enjoyed a lot of freedom in doing our own thing.
Sloan are actively seeking European distribution for their new album Between The Bridges.