Well Upholstered Times From Another Day

Sloan @ Knitting Factory 6/30/2011

Follow the Leader / The Answer Was You / Unkind / The Marquee and the Moon / Snowsuit Sound / 500 Up / Shadow of Love / Everything You’ve Done Wrong / Who Taught You to Live Like That? / Anyone Who’s Anyone / She’s Slowin’ Down Again / Something Wrong / Traces / On the Horizon / It’s Plain to See / Your Daddy Will Do / Don’t You Believe A Word / I’ve Gotta Know / Coax Me / Beverly Terrace / Losing California // People of the Sky / C’mon C’mon / Underwhelmed / The Good in Everyone

Sloan “Beverly Terrace”

A lot of music culture, particularly music criticism, thrives on artists having some sort of narrative. I think that Sloan have suffered for this over the course of their career – they’re consistently very good and entertaining, but it’s surprisingly hard to sell people on “oh, this is a good rock band!” these days. You need an angle. So, with this in mind, Sloan are wise to emphasize their 20th anniversary as a band this year. It makes an asset of things that get taken for granted very easily: Longevity, having a large quantity of great tunes, somehow having the collective temperament to balance out the egos of four distinctly talented songwriters.

This show at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn was, like all Sloan gigs, a no-frills rock party. But it was also a celebration of back catalog – they played a bit from most of their albums and dusted off a bunch of songs that had been out of rotation. Each of the band members went “off list” at some point in the performance and played a song they had not rehearsed. Patrick Pentland proposed at one point that their next tour in the fall should be entirely “off list,” which is kind of a cool idea for them that takes advantage of their deep back catalog. I just hope that if they do that, it doesn’t come at the expense of material from The Double Cross, which all comes across really well in concert. I was particularly impressed by “Beverly Terrace,” which was a bit less refined, but emphasized a Spoon-like tension I had not really noticed up until just then.

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